Carlo Mattogno - A N A U S C H W I T Z D o C T o R ' S e y e W I T N e S S A C C o U N T

AN AUSCHWITZ DOCTOR’S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
An Auschwitz Doctor’s
Eyewitness Account
The Bestselling Tall Tales of

Dr. Mengele’s Assistant Analyzed
Carlo Mattogno, Miklós Nyiszli
Castle Hill Publishers

P.O. Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
February 2018
HOLOCAUST HANDBOOKS, Volume 37:
Carlo Mattogno, Miklós Nyiszli:
An Auschwitz Doctor’s Eyewitness Account:
The Bestselling Tall Tales of Dr. Mengele’s Assistant Analyzed
Translated from the Italian and Hungarian by the author, by Kladderadatsch,
and by Germar Rudolf
Uckfield, East Sussex: CASTLE HILL PUBLISHERS
PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
February 2018
ISBN10: 1-59148-152-X (print edition)

ISBN13: 978-1-59148-152-2 (print edition)
ISSN: 1529-7748
Published by CASTLE HILL PUBLISHERS

Manufactured worldwide
© Carlo Mattogno
Distribution
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Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
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Set in Times New Roman
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Cover Illustrations: top: Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz (left); the only
known portrait of Dr. Miklós Nyiszli (center); another wartime image of Dr.
Josef Mengele (right); bottom: cover arts of various editions of Nyiszli’s best-
selling book.
C. MATTOGNO, M. NYISZLI ∙ AN AUSCHWITZ DOCTOR’S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT 5
Table of Contents
Page
Introduction ..................................................................................................... 9
Part 1: Miklós Nyiszli’s Book ....................................................................... 17
I Was Dr. Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist in the Auschwitz
Crematorium ........................................................................................ 19
Declaration ........................................................................................... 19
Chapter I .............................................................................................. 19
Chapter II ............................................................................................. 23
Chapter III ............................................................................................ 24
Chapter IV ........................................................................................... 28
Chapter V ............................................................................................. 30
Chapter VI ........................................................................................... 32
Chapter VII .......................................................................................... 38
Chapter VIII ......................................................................................... 43
Chapter IX ........................................................................................... 49
Chapter X ............................................................................................. 50
Chapter XI ........................................................................................... 52
Chapter XII .......................................................................................... 55
Chapter XIII ......................................................................................... 57
Chapter XIV......................................................................................... 60
Chapter XV .......................................................................................... 62
Chapter XVI......................................................................................... 64
Chapter XVII ....................................................................................... 67
Chapter XVIII ...................................................................................... 68
Chapter XIX......................................................................................... 69
Chapter XX .......................................................................................... 72
Chapter XXI......................................................................................... 76
Chapter XXII ....................................................................................... 78
Chapter XXIII ...................................................................................... 79
Chapter XXIV ...................................................................................... 80
Chapter XXV ....................................................................................... 82
Chapter XXVI ...................................................................................... 83
Chapter XXVII .................................................................................... 85
Chapter XXVIII ................................................................................... 91
Chapter XXIX ...................................................................................... 94
Chapter XXX ..................................................................................... 102
Chapter XXXI .................................................................................... 105
Chapter XXXII .................................................................................. 110
Chapter XXXIII ................................................................................. 112
Chapter XXXIV ................................................................................. 113
6 C. MATTOGNO, M. NYISZLI ∙ AN AUSCHWITZ DOCTOR’S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT
Chapter XXXV .................................................................................. 115

Chapter XXXVI ................................................................................. 118
Chapter XXXVII................................................................................ 120
Chapter XXXVIII .............................................................................. 121
Chapter XXXIX ................................................................................. 124
Chapter XL ........................................................................................ 128
Epilogue ............................................................................................. 130
Part 2: Other Documents by and about Miklós Nyiszli .......................... 133
2.1. Miklós Nyiszli’s Declaration of July 28, 1945 .................................. 135
2.2. Miklós Nyiszli’s “Testimony” at the I.G. Farben Trial ..................... 139
2.2.1. The “Testimony”...................................................................... 139
2.2.2. “Tanú voltam Nürnbergben” – “I Was a Witness at
Nuremberg” ............................................................................. 140
2.2.3. Nyiszli at Nuremberg: The Affidavit of October 8, 1947 ........ 160
2.2.4. Nyiszli’s “Testimony” at the I.G. Farben Trial: an Unheard
Imposture ................................................................................. 165
2.3. The Correspondence between Paul Rassinier and Miklós Nyiszli..... 170
2.3.1. The Correspondence between Paul Rassinier and Albert Paraz ... 170
2.3.2. The Correspondence among Paul Rassinier, Les Temps
Modernes and Miklós Nyiszli.................................................. 173
Part 3: Critical Analysis of Miklós Nyiszli’s Statements ........................ 179
3.1. From Hungary to Camp BIIf at Birkenau .......................................... 181
3.1.1. The Journey .............................................................................. 181
3.1.2. Nyiszli’s Arrival at Birkenau ................................................... 182
3.1.3. The Monowitz Camp (Buna) ................................................... 182
3.1.4. The Hospital Camp BIIf at Birkenau ....................................... 189
3.2. The Birkenau Crematoria ................................................................... 192
3.2.1 Terminology.............................................................................. 192
3.2.2. The History of the Birkenau Crematoria.................................. 195
3.2.3. Furnaces and Cremation Capacity ........................................... 197
3.2.4. Flaming Chimneys ................................................................... 202
3.2.5. Access to the Crematoria and Repairs ..................................... 203
3.2.6. Demolition of the Crematoria .................................................. 205
3.3. Extermination Technology: the “Gas Chambers” .............................. 207
3.3.1. Zyklon B .................................................................................. 207
3.3.2. The “Gas Chambers” ............................................................... 213
3.3.3. The Girl Who Survived the “Gassing” .................................... 225
3.3.4. Dental Gold .............................................................................. 228
3.4. The “Gassings” .................................................................................. 230
3.4.1. The Czech Camp ...................................................................... 230
3.4.2. The Jews from Corfu ............................................................... 231
3.4.3. The Gypsy Camp (Zigeuner-Familienlager) ........................... 233
3.4.4. Camp C (BIIc) ......................................................................... 233

3.4.5. The Riga Ghetto ....................................................................... 236
3.4.6. The Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto ............................................ 236
3.4.7. The Theresienstadt Ghetto ....................................................... 238
3.4.8. The Milo Ghetto ...................................................................... 243
3.4.9. The End of the “Gassings”....................................................... 243
3.4.10. Transports and Deportees ...................................................... 244
3.4.11. Balance Sheet of the Extermination ....................................... 246
3.5. Extermination Technology: The Pyres .............................................. 248
3.5.1. Location ................................................................................... 248
3.5.2. Pyres and Aerial Photographs .................................................. 250
3.5.3. The “Farmhouse” (Presumed “Bunker 2”) .............................. 250
3.5.4. Killing Technique and Number of Victims ............................. 252
3.6. The Sonderkommando ....................................................................... 256
3.6.1. The Succession of Sonderkommandos ..................................... 256
3.6.2. The Sonderkommando Revolt .................................................. 259
3.6.3. The Extermination of the Ninth Sonderkommando ................. 265
3.6.4. The Crematoria Personnel ....................................................... 266
3.7. Topography and Layout ..................................................................... 269
3.7.1. The Topography of Birkenau ................................................... 269
3.7.2. Layout of the Crematoria ......................................................... 270
3.8. Chronology ........................................................................................ 277
3.9. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp......................................................... 280
3.10. Evacuation to Mauthausen ............................................................... 284
PART 4: Nyiszli’s Testimony in the Context of Trials and Other
Testimonies .................................................................................................. 287
4.1. Detainees and SS Men Mentioned by Nyiszli ................................... 289
4.1.1. Sentkeller ................................................................................. 289
4.1.2. Lewy and Grósz ....................................................................... 289
4.1.3. Epstein ..................................................................................... 294
4.1.4. Heller ....................................................................................... 299
4.1.5. Nyiszli’s Three Assistants ....................................................... 299
4.1.6. Dina.......................................................................................... 300
4.1.7. Michel, Pipel and Dajen........................................................... 301
4.1.8. Bennamia [Bennahmias] and Olleé [Olère] ............................. 301
4.1.9. Rottenführer Holländer, Eindenmüller, Dr. Klein ................... 304
4.1.10. Mengele ................................................................................. 304
4.1.11. Was Nyiszli Jewish at all? ..................................................... 307
4.2. Dr. Charles Sigismund Bendel, Sonderkommando ............................ 309
4.2.1. A Professional Witness ............................................................ 309
4.2.2. Nyiszli and Mengele ................................................................ 309
4.2.3. The Crematoria ........................................................................ 312
4.2.4. The “Gas Chambers” ............................................................... 314

4.2.5. The Number of Victims ........................................................... 320
4.2.6. Dental Gold .............................................................................. 323
4.2.7. Disinfestations with Zyklon B ................................................. 323
4.2.8. Nyiszli versus Bendel .............................................................. 326
4.3. Gassings and Cremations at the Auschwitz Camp ............................. 338
4.3.1. The Defendants’ Knowledge during the I.G. Farben Trial ...... 338
4.3.2. The Stories of Hungarian Jews Deported to Auschwitz .......... 347
Part 5: Nyiszli’s Statements in the Orthodox Holocaust Narrative ....... 351
5.1. The Quotation Cherry Pickers ........................................................... 353
5.2. The Critics.......................................................................................... 368
5.2.1 The Critique of Jean-Claude Pressac ........................................ 368
5.2.2 The Critique of Charles D. Provan ........................................... 371
Appendix ...................................................................................................... 385
Dr. Mengele’s “Medical Experiments” on Twins in the Birkenau
Gypsy Camp ...................................................................................... 387
Bibliography.............................................................................................. 413
1. Sources Used for this Study ........................................................... 413
2. General Bibliography ..................................................................... 413
3. Principal Editions and Translations of Miklós Nyiszli’s Book ...... 421
Archive Abbreviations .............................................................................. 424
Documents ................................................................................................ 425
Index of Names ......................................................................................... 471
Introduction
In spring of 1946, the Jewish Hungarian physician Miklós Nyiszli privately

published a book of memoirs entitled Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az
auschwitz-i krematóriumban (I Was Dr. Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist in the
Auschwitz Crematorium).1 The next year this text was republished by the Bu-
dapest daily Világ (World) in forty-one installments between February 16 and
April 6,2 before being published in book form under the paper’s imprint later
that year.
At the beginning of 1951, extracts from this book, translated into French
by Tibère Kremer, appeared in a two-part article in the French review Les
Temps Modernes under the title “S.S. Obersturmfuhrer docteur Mengele:
Journal d’un médecin déporté au crématorium d’Auschwitz.”3 The complete4
text in French translation appeared in book form ten years later in 1961 with
the title Médecin à Auschwitz: Souvenirs d’un médecin déporté. That same
year, Nyiszli’s memoir also saw the light in German translation, serialized in
numbers 3-11 of the Munich magazine Quick under the title “Auschwitz:
Tagebuch eines Lagerarztes.”
These publications attracted the attention of Paul Rassinier, founder of
Holocaust revisionism, as well as that of his friend Albert Paraz, who alerted
him to the first remarks in the French press regarding the articles in Les Temps
Modernes. Rassinier contacted Nyiszli (see Chapter 2.3.), and he later devoted
a few pages to the doctor’s memoir, particularly in his books Ulysse trahi par
les siens and Le Drame des juifs européens. Rassinier’s criticisms, at least in
part, were well founded and pertinent; they concentrated on obviously false or
1
The various texts authored by Nyiszli are listed with all pertinent bibliographic information in the
first part of the Bibliography in the Appendix.
2
For details of serial publication, see György 1987, p. 294.
3
In the title of the French text “Obersturmfuhrer” is spelled incorrectly, without an umlaut.
4
Or rather, substantially complete. The Julliard edition omits Chapter 24 of the original text.
absurd declarations by Nyiszli, but also highlighted various contradictions be-

tween the translations then available.
In the 1980s, in turn, the theme aroused my interest, and I decided to write
a critical study on Nyiszli’s testimony. Thus was born my book ‘Medico ad
Auschwitz’: Anatomia di un falso, based on the Italian translation of the 1961
French edition,5 but with an attentive eye on the latter as well.
The work, characterized by the late Charles D. Provan in 2001 as “a won-
derful treatment, exhaustive and extremely thorough” (Provan 2001) was sub-
divided into two parts. The first contained the historical-critical analysis prop-
er, broken down in the following chapters:
I – Arrival of Nyiszli at Birkenau
II – Geographical errors
III – Topographical errors (Birkenau camp)
IV – History of the Birkenau crematoria
V – The Birkenau crematoria: furnaces and cremation capacity
VI – Technique of the “extermination”: the “gas chambers”
VII – The “gassings”
VIII – The end of the “gassings”
IX – Technique of the “extermination”: the pyres
X – Balance sheet of the “extermination”
XI – The Sonderkommando
XII – Internal contradictions
XIII – Chronological contradictions
XIV – Chronological errors
XV – More falsifications, errors and incongruities
The second part was a text-critical comparison of the principal translations
then available, that is, the French and German versions mentioned above plus
the English translation titled Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account.6
In the course of that comparison I uncovered more than 70 divergences and
omissions of various kinds among these translations, so I concluded at last
that, in order to know what Nyiszli really wrote, the only solution was to have
recourse to the original text itself.
I thus dedicated myself to the study of Hungarian, procured a copy of the
first edition of Nyiszli’s book and translated it into Italian. During that period,
I also examined other important texts, like the appendix to the 1964 Hungarian
re-edition of Nyiszli’s book – Orvos voltam Auschwitzban – and the series of
articles by Nyiszli titled “Tanú voltam Nürnbergben” (I was a witness at Nu-
5
For bibliographic details on the principal editions and translations of Miklós Nyiszli’s book see
the third part of the Bibliography in the Appendix.
6
Translated by Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver. Although it preceded the “complete” 1961
French edition published by Julliard in order of publication, this English edition is in fact a re-
translation of Kremer’s French version, adapted (rather freely in places) by Seaver.
remberg) which saw the light of day in the Budapest daily Világ (World) in
1948 and upon which I will elaborate in Chapter 2.2. of the current study.
Nyiszli’s “testimony” was quickly taken up by the nascent historiography
of the Holocaust as a decisive testimonial proof of the Auschwitz “gas cham-
bers,” starting with Gerald Reitlinger’s 1953 The Final Solution (p. 151), and
then appearing in other books such as Adler/Langbein/Lingens-Reiner’s
Auschwitz: Zeugnisse und Berichte (pp. 64-73), Poliakov’s Auschwitz (pp. 46-
48, 62-65), the first French edition of The Auschwitz Album (Freyer et al.
1983, p. 94), the collective Polish work Auschwitz: Nazi Extermination Camp
(Rada… 1978, p. 124) and Heiner Lichtenstein’s Warum Auschwitz nicht
bombardiert wurde (pp. 78-81), to name a few.
This success was all the more strange given that Nyiszli appeared as a wit-
ness at neither the Belsen Trial (September-November 1945), nor the Tesch
Trial (March 1946), nor the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg
(November 1945-October 1946), nor the trial of Rudolf Höss in Warsaw
(March 1947), nor the so-called Auschwitz Garrison Trial in Krakow (No-
vember-December 1947). Moreover, at those trials held after his death in 1956
– notably, the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (April 1961-May 1962) and the
Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (December 1963-August 1965) – Nyiszli’s testi-
mony was not accepted into evidence. On the matter of his supposed “testi-
mony” at the I.G. Farben Trial (August 1947-July 1948) I will have more to
say below (see Chapter 2.2.).
The remarkable documentation on Auschwitz published by Jean-Claude
Pressac in 1989 signaled the end, in principle if not in practice, of Nyiszli as
an eyewitness to the gas chambers of this camp, because despite assurances to
the contrary by the French researcher (as we shall see, he held Nyiszli to be
“an authentic witness”), the documents themselves resoundingly refute
Nyiszli’s claims. In fact, in the single chapter from Nyiszli’s text which Pres-
sac subjected to critical examination (Chapter VII), he counted at least 25 “er-
rors” and one “multiplier” – which even he finds incomprehensible – by
which Nyiszli routinely inflates numbers by a factor of four (Pressac 1989, pp.
474-475). I will return to Pressac’s rather too casual commentary in Chapter
5.2.
As a matter of firmly established practice, the Auschwitz Museum authori-
ties avoid critical analysis of any witness testimony, and Nyiszli’s is no excep-
tion: they still consider it fundamental despite the grave contradictions it pre-
sents with respect to the documentation in their own possession. Indeed, at
times they cover up such contradictions with an all-too-evident complicity
(see Chapter 5.1.).
Other researchers, such as Raul Hilberg, do without Nyiszli’s testimony
almost completely; Robert Jan van Pelt limits himself to a brief reference void
of significance (van Pelt 2002, p. 445).
Worthy of particular mention here is Charles D. Provan, “a revisionist who

believes in the gas chambers,” as Ernst Zündel once described him, who
passed away at a young age in 2007. Provan was one of the rare few who were
researching Nyiszli in those days, and he made his results public in an article
titled “New Light on Dr. Miklos Nyiszli and His Auschwitz Book.”7 I will
consider him as well in Part 5 of this study.
But if, since the publication of Pressac’s work, Nyiszli’s fortunes have in-
evitably been in decline in relation to the gas chambers, they have risen in the
eyes of other Holocaust historians, who trot him out as witness par excellence
to the presumed nefarious crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele. The cue for this de-
velopment was furnished in 1986 by Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, authors
of the book Mengele: The Complete Story. In the second chapter of their book,
“Auschwitz: May 1943-January 1945” (ibid., pp. 19-58), they essentially rely
on Nyiszli, citing him at least fourteen times, despite having various docu-
ments such as Dr. Mengele’s diary, autobiography and letters at their disposal
(ibid., p. 354).
Franciszek Piper, in a paper entitled “Gas Chambers and Crematoria”
which appeared in 1994 in the anthology Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death
Camp (Gutman/Berenbaum 1994, pp. 157-182), mentions Nyiszli solely as a
physician who performed dissections of twins at the orders of Dr. Mengele
and as a witness to the presence of a gold smeltery in Crematorium II (ibid., p.
168). A year later, in the third volume (“Extermination”) of the anthology
Auschwitz, 1940-1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp (Długobor-
ski/Piper 1995/1999/2000), Piper cited Nyiszli’s memoir a number of times,
but without ever revealing the profound contradictions that exist between his
claims and those of the other witnesses who remained in Auschwitz until the
arrival of the Soviets (see Chapter 5.1.).
Helena Kubica, a researcher at the Auschwitz State Museum, subsequently
confirmed Nyiszli’s new function as “eyewitness” to Mengele, making him a
central figure of her 1997 article “Dr. Mengele und seine Verbrechen im Kon-
zentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau” (“Dr. Mengele and his crimes in
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp”).
This aspect of Nyiszli’s memoir, though it has become predominant over
the years, interests us here only marginally, particularly because I have
demonstrated elsewhere the complete documentary vacuity of the accusations
laid against Dr. Mengele, promoted to the rank of “Angel of Death” for the
occasion (Mattogno 2008; see the updated translation in the Appendix).
In this context, no mainstream historian has taken into consideration the
following fact which, from the perspective of orthodox holocaust historiog-
raphy, should appear rather extraordinary. In the “Declaration” with which he
begins his book, Nyiszli writes:
7
The anecdote about Zündel is related by Provan himself on p. 20 of his 2001 article.
“As chief physician of the crematoria of Auschwitz, I drew up innumerable au-

topsy and forensic medical reports and signed them with my tattoo number.
These documents were countersigned by my superior, Dr. Mengele, and then
shipped by me to the address of the Institut für rassenbiologische und anthro-
pologische Forschungen in Berlin-Dahlem, one of the world’s most illustrious
medical centers. They should still be discoverable to this day in the archives of
that great research institute”
Returning to the subject in Chapter VIII, he adds:
“I sent countless such packages [i.e., of autopsy specimens] to Berlin-Dahlem
during the course of my activity in the crematorium, and I received replies
about them with exhaustive scientific commentary or instructions. I set up a
separate dossier to keep the correspondence. In their letters to Dr. Mengele
they always expressed their grateful appreciation for the rare material sent to
them.”
On the basis of the descriptions in the book, it appears that Nyiszli would have
performed at least 170 autopsies while at Auschwitz. The extraordinary fact,
then, is simply that despite the “countless” autopsy reports written and signed
by Nyiszli and the “countless” packages of biological material sent by him to
the “Institut für rassenbiologische und anthropologische Forschungen in Ber-
lin-Dahlem” (as he calls it in his “Declaration”),8 there does not exist a single
piece of paper in the documentary record bearing Nyiszli’s signature!
But there is another fact, no less extraordinary, which also is continually
passed over in silence by orthodox Holocaust historians. At the Belsen trial in
late 1945, the Romanian Jewish physician Charles Sigismund Bendel claimed,
just as Nyiszli would claim a few months later with the first publication of his
book, to have been the doctor of the Sonderkommando for the Birkenau crem-
atoria, starting, in his case, in August 1944.9 Since Nyiszli, according to the
account in his book as we shall see, was himself at the crematoria from May
1944 to January 1945, this means that the two doctors spent at least four
months together in the same place, where they presumably saw the same
things and lived through the same events, yet not only are they ignorant of one
another, but they produced completely contradictory testimony with regard to
these matters. I will address this question in detail in Chapter 4.2.
8
Later on, in Chapter VIII, Nyiszli speaks of “the Institute for Racial and Developmental Biology
in Berlin-Dahlem,” with “developmental” (fejlődéstani) replacing “anthropological” (anthropolo-
gische) in his translation of the German name as presented in the “Declaration.” Both names,
however, are wrong: the institute in question in fact was called the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für An-
thropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology,
Human Heredity, and Eugenics). Curiously, given his implied complicity in Mengele’s alleged
crimes, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, director the institute from 1942 onward, was not the sub-
ject of any judicial action, Allied or German, in the postwar period.
9
Phillips 1949, pp. 130ff. It is not clear from Bendel’s Belsen testimony when he left the cremato-
ria, but later statements indicate that he remained there until the evacuation of the camp on Janu-
ary 17, 1945. See Section 4.2.2.
A brief explanation may be in order here. After the arrival of the Soviets at
Auschwitz, the prisoners remaining at the camp lived indiscriminately for
more than three months beneath a propaganda bombardment from two official
“investigations” – one Soviet, the other Polish – into the presumed extermina-
tion in the “gas chambers.”10 In particular, the “eyewitnesses” remaining at the
camp were able not only to consult with each other, but to examine locations,
ruins and even building plans and other German documents, thus absorbing
the official version of events which was then developing.
On the other hand, those prisoners evacuated from the camp ahead of time
took with them the propaganda stories invented by the various resistance
movements of the camp, without being able to benefit from these final “up-
dates.” This helps to explain the substantial differences which exist between
the statements of the first category of prisoners – those, to be clear, who were
subjected to interrogation first by the Soviets and then by Judge Jan Sehn –
and the statements of the second category, in which Nyiszli and Bendel found
themselves. Because the propaganda stories which circulated at Auschwitz
were numerous and multifarious, and because none of them was able to im-
pose itself as official “truth,”11 each witness drew literary elements from the
various strands available – a circumstance which in turn helps explain the fact
that the testimonies of Nyiszli and Bendel are in complete mutual contradic-
tion.
Very few books have struck the collective Holocaust imagination quite like
Nyiszli’s, as is attested to by its considerable publishing success: translations
and reprints have followed one another, and continue to follow one another at
an ever-increasing pace. In the Bibliography to this study, I present an over-
view of this publishing history, without any pretense of completeness, merely
to demonstrate the amplitude of this remarkable phenomenon: apart from var-
ious re-editions of the Hungarian text, there abound translations into Italian,
French, English, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese, He-
brew, Arabic, Sinhalese and Romanian.
Nyiszli’s book has also inspired two films, Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey
Zone (2001) and László Nemes’s Saul fia (Son of Saul, 2015).
With regard to translations made directly from the Hungarian original, one
of the best undoubtedly is the 1992 German translation Im Jenseits der
Menschlichkeit: Ein Gerichtsmediziner in Auschwitz (Beyond humanity: a fo-
rensic doctor in Auschwitz), which is supplemented by explanatory notes and
an interesting appendix. Also worth mentioning is the 1996 Polish translation
10
The two investigations resulted, respectively, in the so-called Extraordinary State Commission re-
port on Auschwitz, entered into evidence as Document 008-USSR (often cited as USSR-8) at the
International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (IMT, Vol. XXXIX, pp. 241-262; in German) and
Polish investigating judge Jan Sehn’s report (Sehn 1946). The former is available in English trans-
lation in: Soviet… 1946, pp. 283-300.
11
I have presented an overview of these various literary strands in Mattogno 2018.
Byłem asystentem doktora Mengele: Wspomnienia lekarza z Oświęcimia (I

was Dr. Mengele’s assistant: memories of a doctor at Auschwitz), though
more for the annotations by Franciszek Piper than for any fidelity to the Hun-
garian text.
Practically all of the more important translations of Nyiszli’s book made
directly from the original text contain omissions and manipulations here and
there. It is not the purpose of this study to make a systematic comparison, but
in the translation of the book which follows I underline certain passages omit-
ted from the “classic” translation of Tibère Kremer.12 Here it will suffice per-
haps to mention, by way of example, a passage invariably omitted in all the
translations that I’ve examined:13
“Three great men form and shape the character of the peoples of the world
and ensure their future: Stalin! the genius leader of the Russian people, Roo-
sevelt Franklin Delano, wise president of the United States, and Churchill, the
British lion.”
I will provide further details on this theme in Chapter 5.1.
The translations in question also allow themselves all too ample liberties in
correcting, to a certain extent, Nyiszli’s peculiar technical terminology, espe-
cially regarding the Birkenau crematoria. This question will be analyzed fur-
ther in Section 3.2.1.
The documentation on Auschwitz has grown enormously since I published
my original study of Nyiszli’s book in 1988, and now allows his testimony to
be evaluated in a more thorough manner.
That said, his invented “testimony” at the I.G. Farben Trial, as I shall
demonstrate in Chapter 2.2., is already more than sufficient to get a quite clear
and precise idea of the seriousness and reliability of this “eyewitness.”
***
In the translation of Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i
krematóriumban which follows, I have indicated in square brackets the origi-
nal Hungarian text in various places where Nyiszli’s choice of words is par-
ticularly significant, and I have also let stand the innumerable question marks
and exclamation marks with which the book is littered. Nyiszli’s prose
abounds in elliptical expressions, which I have supplemented above all in
those cases where the sense would otherwise be unclear, as well as in inde-
terminate subjects and sudden switches between tenses and singular and plural
forms. To the extent that they do not impair comprehensibility, however, such
12
In their French and English translations, respectively, Kremer and Seaver suppressed Nyiszli’s
Chapter 24 altogether; Seaver moreover merged Chapter 16 with 17 (making for 39 and 38 chap-
ters respectively, instead of Nyiszli’s 40).
13
Nyiszli 1946, p. 166. The various versions examined handle the passage as follows: Médecin à
Auschwitz (1961a), p. 242, omission not indicated; Im Jenseits der Menschlichkeit (1992), p. 151,
omission indicated with ellipsis; Byłem asysyentem doktora Mengele (1996), p. 168, omission not
indicated.
apparent “blemishes” have been faithfully reproduced in the translation below.

No attempt has been made to polish Nyiszli’s text; rather the goal at all times
has been to reflect its true character, both in style and content, as accurately as
possible, without omission or alteration.14
Wherever linguistic explanation is required for German terminology used
by Nyiszli, I refer the reader to an apposite footnote. Terms and expressions in
German and Latin are reproduced in the form, sometimes erroneous, in which
they appear in the original text. As an aid to recognition, however, such for-
eign terms are printed in italics in the translation, a practice which Nyiszli
does not follow in his book.
The translation is provided with essential explanatory notes only; all neces-
sary additional analysis will be presented in the later parts of this study, Part
Three in particular. It will at all events be helpful for the reader to keep in
mind that Nyiszli’s numbering of the Birkenau crematoria from I to IV, while
not an error as such,15 differs from the more familiar practice of numbering
them from II to V (reserving I as the designation for the crematorium at the
Auschwitz Main Camp).
14
Translator’s remark: In preparing the English version of Nyiszli’s book below, the translator has
consulted the original Hungarian text throughout to ensure that no inaccuracies creep into the
translation as a result of working at a linguistic second remove. While following Mattogno’s Ital-
ian version in its strict concern for accuracy, the English version thus is not a mere retranslation,
but is in effect a first-order translation in its own right, rigorously checked against the source ma-
terial. The object, at all times, has been to reflect the content and character of Nyiszli’s writing as
closely as possible. The same principle of consulting original texts is followed, wherever feasible,
in the translation of other quoted material in later parts of the study as well.
15
After the decommissioning of the original crematorium (I) in the Auschwitz Main Camp in July
1943, the newly built Birkenau crematoria (II-V) were in practice renamed with numbers I
through IV, a fact reflected in various testimonies of the immediate postwar period. Modern
scholarly practice, on the other hand, generally restores the original numbering. See Nyiszli 1992,
p. 164, Note 28.
Part 1:
Miklós Nyiszli’s Book

I Was Dr. Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist

in the Auschwitz Crematorium
By Dr. Miklós Nyiszli
Declaration
I, the undersigned Nyiszli Miklós,16 M.D., ex-prisoner of the K.Z., bearer of
tattoo number A-8450, hereby declare that in the work now published, the
creation of my own hand, a work which contains within it the darkest pages in
the history of humanity, free from all emotion and in strict conformity with
the truth, and without the slightest exaggeration or embellishment, I write as
the direct spectator of, and participant in, the activity of the crematoria and
cremation pyres of Auschwitz, into whose flames vanished millions of fathers,
mothers and children.
As chief physician of the crematoria of Auschwitz, I drew up innumerable
autopsy and forensic medical reports and signed them with my tattoo number.
These documents were countersigned by my superior, Dr. Mengele, and then
shipped by me to the address of the Institut für rassenbiologische und anthro-
pologische Forschungen17 in Berlin-Dahlem, one of the world’s most illustri-
ous medical centers. They should still be discoverable to this day in the ar-
chives of that great research institute.
In writing this work I do not aim at literary success. I was a doctor, not a
writer, when I experienced these horrors exceeding all imagination, and as I
undertake now to describe them, I write with the pen of a doctor, not a report-
er.18
At Oradea-Nagyvárad, in the month of March, 1946

Dr. Nyiszli Miklós
Chapter I
In a late afternoon in May, in a closed freight car with windows covered with
barbed wire, the smell of ninety dirty people crammed together is unbearable
The original Hungarian title is: Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az Auschwitz-i krematóriumban
16
In Hungarian the family name precedes the given name.
17
“Institute for Racial-Biological and Anthropological Studies.” In German in the original. The in-
stitute’s correct full name was Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre
und Eugenik, or The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.
18
In English in the original [riporter].
enough already, let alone the stench of the buckets of excrement filled to the
brim.
It is a train for deportees, a train made up of forty wagons like this one; al-
ready it is the fourth day it has been traveling, kilometer after kilometer, first
through Slovak territory, then through the Generalgouvernement,19 bearing us
within it toward a still-unknown destination. In the convoy is the first group of
the million [egymillió] Hungarian Jews condemned to extermination. The Ta-
tra Mountains are behind us. We race at full speed toward Lublin, then comes
Krakau.20 During the war, both cities became centers of concentration, that is,
centers of extermination [megsemmisítőhelye] for the anti-Nazi citizens of Eu-
rope, whom the representatives of the new European order dragged here from
the territories they occupied.
Leaving Krakau, our train runs along for give or take an hour before com-
ing to a stop at an imposing station. A sign in gothic lettering declares the
name of the station: Auschwitz. To us it is merely a name. We have never
heard of it, whether in connection with the railways, or in any other regard.
Around our train, as I watch through the cracks, there is a great coming and
going. Our previous SS guards get off. A new group takes their post. In the
same way, the railway personnel for the trip depart as well. As I gather from
snatches of conversation, we are almost at the final destination of our voyage.
The train sets off again, and after a run of some twenty minutes it once
more comes to a stop with a long blast of its whistle.
I find a crack from which I can look outside again. All around is a plain of
yellow clay, an arid terrain, as the land of eastern Silesia generally is. Only an
occasional leafy thicket and the twisting course of the Vistula River break the
monotony here and there. The area that opens out before me is enclosed in pil-
lars of reinforced concrete placed in regular files, along which are strung nu-
merous lines of barbed wire. Porcelain insulators and signs placed at frequent
intervals reveal that the wires are carrying a high-voltage current. The con-
crete pillars form a quadrangle within which there are hundreds of barracks
with tarpaper roofs, painted green, which form long straight streets.
Inside the fences I see figures in the striped uniforms of prisoners. They are
carrying rough-sawn planks. Another group of men marches in regular files
with shovels on their shoulders. Further in the distance, large bales are being
loaded onto trucks. Along the fences, at a distance of 30-40 meters from each
other, elevated towers reveal the character of the place. Guard towers! On
each of them, a soldier in a green uniform rests his elbows on a machine gun
mounted on a tripod. This is the Concentration Camp Auschwitz, or as the
19
In German in the original.
20
In German spelling in the original.
Germans say – they love to abbreviate everything – K.Z., pronounced

“Kacett”!21
The knowledge is not reassuring, but the for the moment nervous curiosity
overwhelms the sense of fear.
I look around me at my companions in the wagon. Our group is made up of
26 doctors, 8 pharmacists, our wives, our children, a few older people, men
and women, parents of our colleagues. Seated on baggage or on the floor, they
stare into empty space with weary, anxious faces. Perhaps they are gripped by
a terrible presentiment, but in the bustle of arrival even this does not cause
them to stir. Some of the children are sleeping, others are eating scraps of left-
over food, for the most part bread. Those who lack even this comfort pass dry
tongues helplessly over lips chapped with hunger and thirst.
The sand outside squeaks beneath heavy footsteps. Loud orders break the
monotony of waiting. The padlocks on the wagons are opened. The door
slides open on one side and immediately the order sounds out: Leave the large
baggage inside, everyone down off the train with their own hand luggage! We
reach our children and our wives down in our arms from the meter-and-a-half-
high wagon. Soon we are lined up before the train.
Before us stands a young SS officer with glossy black boots and a gold ro-
sette. Clearly he is in charge, the soldiers waiting on his commands. I don’t
know SS ranks, but from the caduceus badge on his arm, I presume that he is a
doctor.
Later I learn that he is an SS Hauptsturmführer.22 His name is Doctor Men-
gele, and he is the chief physician of Concentration Camp Auschwitz [az
auschwitzi koncentrációs tábor első orvosa]. He is present on the ramp at the
arrival of every train. He is the doctor who makes the selections. In a few
short minutes we will discover what a selection is at Auschwitz. The other
phases of the process we only get to know later, each according to his fate.
And now it begins! Hurriedly the SS guards separate the men from the
women, and the children under 14. The latter remain with their mothers.
In this manner the long formation in front of the wagons divides into two
parts. We are suddenly separated from our families. The guards respond to our
anxious questions in a reassuring tone. “It’s nothing,” they say. “We’re taking
you to have a shower at the disinfection area, that’s the rule here, and then
everyone will see their family again.”
Until the selection of the group, four thousand people strong, is completed,
I have time to look around myself. In the light of the fading day, the landscape
I saw from inside the wagon now leaps to life. Here there is much more to see.
21
Phonetic Hungarian transcription of the German Kazett which in turn is the German pronunciation
for the letter names K and Z. “K.Z.” itself is an abbreviation for Konzentrationslager (concentra-
tion camp).
22
Nyiszli here uses főrohamvezető, the literal Hungarian equivalent of the German Hauptsturmfüh-
rer (“head storm leader”). The rank is equivalent to that of captain in traditional armies.
The first thing that draws my attention – rivets it, so to speak – is a gigantic
square chimney, tapering toward the top and built of red bricks, which emerg-
es from the top of a factory-like, two-story building, also built of red bricks.
It’s a strange shape for a factory chimney, but what is really impressive is
the column of fire 8-10 meters high [a 8-10 méteres lángoszlop] which gushes
from its mouth between the lightning rods at its four corners. I try to imagine
what kind of hellish kitchen it could be to need such a fire. Then it comes to
me. I am in Germany, the land of crematoria, where I spent ten years as a stu-
dent and doctor. I know that every last little German city has its crematorium.
So it is a crematorium! Not far from it is another, and beyond, in a grove
[egy lugasban] which partly hides it, I spot a third similar building, all with
the same fire-spewing chimneys [ugyanolyan tűzokádó kéményekkel].
A gentle breeze carries the smoke toward us. A nauseating stench of burn-
ing flesh and singed hair strikes my nostrils. A familiar smell! Burning human
flesh emits an acrid smell just like that of church candles made of carrion tal-
low.
There’s much to reflect on in that, but already the second phase of selec-
tion is underway. Men, women and children parade in single file before the se-
lection committee. At a gesture of the selecting physician – I will call him
now by his name, Dr. Mengele – we form ranks again, to the left or to the
right. Now we find ourselves in two groups, one on the left and one on the
right. In the group on the left, I notice, are mostly the old, the crippled, the
sickly, and women with children under fourteen. In the group on the right,
those able to work. Among them I see my wife and my fourteen-year-old
daughter. We have no chance to exchange words now. We wave to one anoth-
er.
Those unable to walk, the sick, the old, the mad, are loaded onto Red Cross
trucks. A few of my older doctor colleagues ask to go with them as well. The
trucks set off first. Then the group on the left, in lines five abreast, at a slow
pace and under an escort of SS guards. In a few minutes, they disappear from
our view beneath the trees of a small woodlot. The group on the right stays
put. Dr. Mengele orders the doctors to form a group to one side. When this is
done, he approaches the group, about fifty doctors in all, and calls on any doc-
tors who did their studies at a German university, are thoroughly versed in
pathological anatomy, and who also practice forensic medicine to step for-
ward.
“But it would be best that you take care,” he adds, “to comply with these
prerequisites, because…” And then follows a menacing, meaningful gesture. I
look at my colleagues to my left and right. Perhaps there are no specialists
among us? Or are they frightened by the threat? No one steps forward. No
matter, I have decided! I leave the line, stand before Mengele and introduce
myself. He interrogates me thoroughly. He asks me where I did my university
studies, where, and with what professors I studied pathological anatomy,
where I have practiced forensic medicine, how long I have worked in that
field, and so on. I must have satisfied him with the precision of my answers.
He orders my colleagues to return to the group on the right, and these now set
off marching along the right-hand way, the way to life, toward the camp… for
now I can reveal what I still did not then know. The group on the left, only
minutes after its departure, had passed through the doors of one of the crema-
toria. And from there there was no return.
Chapter II
As soon as I am alone, my thoughts turn to fate and to Germany, the land
where I spent so many years, the best years of my youth!
Above my head the stars are already out in the sky. High above my head I
see the Big Dipper, just as it is at home in Hungary. The cool air of the even-
ing breeze might even be refreshing, if only it were not blowing toward me the
acrid stench of burning corpses from the crematoria of the Third Reich.23
From the concrete pillars, hundreds of arc lamps send out a dazzling light.
Beyond the chain of lights, however, it is as if the air has become condensed.
It covers the camp like a heavy shroud and one can barely discern the silhou-
ettes of the K.Z. barracks.
The ramp is now deserted, only a few inmates in prison stripes are stirring
here and there, loading the baggage left in the wagons onto trucks. In the
darkness, the forty empty wagons, bearers of our destiny, merge ever more in-
to the gloom of the landscape and the objects around us.
Dr. Mengele gives some last instructions to the SS soldiers still waiting
there, then gets into the driver’s seat of his Opel car and motions for me to get
in behind. The back seat is already occupied. Beside me sits an SS enlisted
man. We set off.
Our car is tossed about on the camp’s bumpy, clay roads, which are much
worn by the spring rains. The brilliant arc lamps along the fences flash swiftly
past us. We stop before a closed iron gate. From the guardhouse, an SS enlist-
ed man rushes to open the way for Dr. Mengele’s familiar car. We proceed for
a few hundred more meters along the camp’s main street between barracks
lined up on either side, then come to a stop before a rather more-elegant build-
ing.
Dr. Mengele gets out of the car. I get out after him. “Camp Office” [Tábo-
riroda] I hastily read on a sign posted at the entrance. We go inside. Several
intelligent-looking individuals in prison clothes are sitting at desks. They all
leap to their feet and stand stiffly to attention without speaking at their places.
23
Nyiszli never uses the German expression Drittes Reich but rather always the Hungarian transla-
tion III. Birodalom.
Dr. Mengele calls over a close-shaved inmate in prison uniform of about

fifty years old. I stand quietly a few meters behind them. I cannot catch what
they are saying. Dr. Sentkeller – for that is his name, as I later learn – head
doctor of Camp Hospital “F,” nods understanding. He calls me to him and ac-
companies me to the desk of another inmate worker. There, the clerk draws
out some pre-printed cards. He asks me for my personal data and records them
in a large volume. He passes the completed cards to an SS escort. We go out-
side. I bow my head before Dr. Mengele as we pass, at which Sentkeller, more
ironically than angrily, barks at me not to play at social niceties here, but ra-
ther get used to the fact, and fast, that this is a concentration camp!
I proceed to the third barracks, alone with my escort. There the sign reads
“Bath and Disinfection” [fűrdő és fertőtlenítő]. My escort hands me over to
his colleague there, along with my card. Two inmates in prison uniforms ap-
proach me. They take away my little doctor’s bag. They search my pockets
and then ask me to undress. A barber arrives. He crops my hair close, shaves
me all over and then sends me under a shower. They wash my head with a so-
lution of calcium chloride. My eyes burn so badly that it takes several minutes
before I can reopen them. In another room I receive a grey jacket and a pair of
striped black trousers in place of the clothes I handed over earlier. My shoes
they return to me, after having immersed them in a tub full of calcium chloride
solution. I put on the clothes. They fit me well, as if they had been tailor-made
for me! Who knows what companion in misfortune once wore them! An in-
mate rolls up the left sleeve of my jacket, reads the number found on my card,
and with practiced speed lays down along my arm innumerable needle pricks
with a little device filled with ink. Where the needle punctures an indistinct
blue stain begins to form. The prisoner reassures me. The skin may be a little
inflamed for now, but that passes in a week or so and the numbers become
clearly visible. So I too am tattooed, I, Dr. Nyiszli Miklós; I cease to exist un-
der my own name and become a mere number, A-8450, a prisoner of the K.Z.
Suddenly the memory of another formal act of inscription comes to mind.
Fifteen years earlier the Dean of Medicine of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-
Universität in Breslau had shaken my hand and, wishing me good luck and a
prosperous future, conferred upon me my doctor’s diploma, cum laude.
Chapter III
I am left in a strange state of inner turmoil, but I have never been one to give
in to empty despair. No matter! I must adapt myself to whatever my situation
brings. I must not despair! I must not become sentimental! I must neither see
too much, nor yet be too sober! And yet I am indeed clearly sober, for I am
saying such things to myself.
My situation for now is not the worst it could be! Dr. Mengele wants to
give me a medical job. Probably I’ll be taking the place, at least in part, of a
German pathologist or forensic specialist from an institute in some German

town who’s been drafted into the army. I am also encouraged by the fact that,
presumably on Dr. Mengele’s orders, I have been given not a prisoner’s uni-
form but rather an excellent civilian suit. It follows that the position reserved
for me is one that requires a neat appearance. But this is just speculation. We
shall see.
From the bath building, accompanied by a new escort who carries my card
in his hand, I pass into the barracks which stands opposite and which bears the
number 12 on its front. It’s a building around 100 meters long. The interior
forms a large hall. Along both sides of the hall run lines of three-tier bunks
made of rough-sawn beams and planks, divided into compartments crowded
with patients. I am in Camp “F,” Hospital Barracks 12.
My SS escort hands my card to an inmate, a chubby-faced older man who
hurriedly stands to attention to receive it. My escort departs, and we two shake
hands. We introduce ourselves. He is the supervisor of Barracks 12. He makes
me comfortable in a small room off the big hall and tells me the story of his
life, as prisoners always do.
He is a German from the Reich24 [birodalmi]. He is fifty years old and by
profession, in civilian life, a bank robber. He explains that he always worked
alone. His last job was a bank robbery in grand style. He robbed one of the
main banks of Düsseldorf in broad daylight. He lived for three years on the
money until he was denounced by his wife, who had separated from him. He
did a ten-year sentence in the Moabit Prison.25 Upon his release, the political
SS were waiting for him as he came out the prison gates, and he next became
a prisoner of K.Z. Auschwitz. He has been in custody here for five years now.
On the breast of his striped shirt, just above his heart, he wears a badge
with a green number on a white background. A green badge in the K.Z. is the
insignia for a professional criminal. He explains the other prisoner insignia to
me: a red badge is for political prisoners, while brown is for Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses, Sabbatarians and Baptists. The notoriously work-averse and prostitutes
are blue. A black badge is for homosexuals charged under paragraph 175. A
white letter “A” embroidered on a black ribbon on the sleeve stands for Arzt,26
or doctor, but there are few of these since only imprisoned doctors actually
holding the position of doctor in the K.Z. receive them.
It is already past midnight, but curiosity keeps fatigue at bay. I listen in-
tently to every word of the barracks supervisor. He knows the complex organ-
ization of the K.Z. He knows by name the commanding SS officers for every
part of the camp. He knows the prominent prisoners27 who have a position
24
That is, a German from Germany proper, as opposed to Germans from other German-speaking
countries or areas.
25
A famous prison in the “Moabit” area of Berlin.
26
27
Nyiszli uses the German term Prominente, rendered in Hungarian as prominens.
here. I discover that K.Z. Auschwitz is the largest extermination camp [meg-
semmisítő tábora] of the Third Reich and not a labor camp! He speaks of the
selections,28 which take place every week in the hospitals and the barracks of
the camp, when they load hundreds of selected prisoners onto trucks and carry
them to the crematoria situated a few hundred meters away.
From his stories I learn about life in the barracks, where 800 to 1000 peo-
ple are massed together in cramped, cagelike, comfortless boxes.29 The feet of
one rest on the head of another, or on a neck or a chest, they lie lengthwise
and crosswise and back-to-front on their miserable pallets. Deprived of any
trace of humanity, they punch and kick and bite one another to secure a space
of just a few centimeters [more] for their brief sleep.
Indeed, the night’s sleep is finished already by three in the morning. The
work-detail bosses,30 cudgels in hand, drive the men from their beds. They
pour outside, jostling each other at the door of the barrack, and are soon stand-
ing in lines. And now begins the most dehumanizing song and dance in the
whole K.Z. repertoire: Appel,31 or “roll call” [sorakozó]. The inmates stand in
five rows. They begin to put themselves in order. The barracks clerk places
the taller ones in the front row, the shorter ones behind. Another “prominent”
arrives, the room duty leader.32 Raining blows heavily down with his fists he
drives the tall prisoners to the back and brings the short ones to the front
again. Finally the barracks supervisor himself emerges from the barracks, well
fed and well dressed. Striped uniform freshly washed and pressed, he strikes a
Napoleonic pose before the formation, inspects the front line, does he not ob-
serve a fault somewhere? He most certainly does. He launches himself at
some men wearing glasses in the front row, slugs them on the chin with his
fists and sends them to the back. Why? No one knows! No one even thinks
about it. This is the K.Z. and no one expects a rhyme or reason for anything.
And so it goes for hours. Fifteen times the roll is counted, this way then
that way, forwards and backwards along the rows. If a line is not straight, the
entire barrack must squat for half an hour with their arms raised. Soon every-
one’s legs are shaking with exhaustion. Even in summer the dawn hours at
Auschwitz are cold. The light, striped material of the uniforms protects neither
from the rain nor from the chill, yet roll call always begins at first light and
continues until 7 a.m., when the SS enlisted man arrives.
28
Nyiszli does not directly use the German term Selektion, but rather always the Hungarian
szelektálás.
29
Thus in the original: bokszokban, from bokszok-, plural of boksz (“box”) and the locative case
ending -ban. The expression as a whole presumably refers to the three-tier bunks mentioned earli-
er.
30
Nyiszli here uses the Hungarian felvigyázók (“bosses” or “overseers”), presumably as a translation
of the camp slang term Kapo, or work-team leader.
31
In German in the original, correctly Appell.
32
Nyiszli here uses a Hungarian translation [szobaszolgálatos] of the German Stubendienst (“room
duty”), the name for a prisoner in charge of ensuring that barracks are kept clean and orderly.
The barracks supervisor, loyal servant of the SS and almost always, in eve-
ry barracks, a green-badged ruffian, stands to attention and reports on unit
strength. The SS man too goes along the lines. He tallies up the columns and
records the headcount in a notebook. If the barracks has any dead – there are 5
or 6 each day, sometimes as many as 10 – they too figure in the roll call. They
must stand there at the end of the row, propped up on either side by a pair of
prisoners, as long as the counting goes on, for dead or alive, the headcount
must add up! It sometimes happens that the Kommando33 tasked with corpse
removal, overwhelmed with work, does not show up for two or three days
with their hand-drawn cart to take away the dead. And so the latter must be
present at every counting until they are finally taken away and removed from
the roster.
After what I have heard, I am glad to have [had] the courage to improve
my lot. By speaking up to Dr. Mengele, I have obtained just the assignment I
wanted. I have obtained an assignment as doctor, and from my first day here I
have managed to avoid sinking into the squalor of the crowd in the quarantine
camp barracks. Thanks to my civilian clothes I have preserved my human as-
pect and tonight I will sleep in a properly made bed in the clean doctor’s room
of Hospital Barracks 12.
Wake-up call is at seven a.m. The doctors, myself among them, line up in
front of the barracks along with the rest of the hospital personnel. We are
counted. The entire operation lasts two, three minutes. The sick are counted in
their boxlike bunks, along with those who have died during the night. The
bodies of the dead still lie among the sick.
At breakfast, which we eat apart in our room, I get to know my medical
colleagues. The chief physician of Hospital Barracks 12, Dr. Lewy, is profes-
sor at the University of Strasbourg; his deputy, Dr. Grósz, professor at the
University of Zagreb. Both are internists. In the field of medical research, they
are eminent figures on a Europe-wide scale.
Here in the K.Z., ignoring danger and fatigue, putting aside their own per-
sonal tragedies, they seek to heal and to alleviate suffering, despite lacking
adequate instruments and serious drugs and despite working in the complete
absence of proper sterilization and antiseptics, in an environment, K.Z.
Auschwitz, where within three to four weeks even those who arrive in the best
physical condition break down under the weight of hunger, squalor, corporal
punishment and hard labor. (How much the worse for those who have an un-
derlying organic illness!) These are men and doctors through and through, one
hundred percent, [in a place] where it is difficult to remain a man and more
difficult still to be a doctor.
33
A German military term meaning a work detail. Nyiszli here uses the borrowed Hungarian equiva-
lent, kommandó.
Subordinate to them, eagerly following their example, is the six-member

medical team. They are French and Greek doctors, of more recent vintage,
kind-hearted and caring. For three years now, they have eaten the bread of the
K.Z., bread made with horse-chestnut flour cut with sawdust [vadgesztenyel-
isztböl készült, fűrészporral hintett kenyerét]. Their mothers, their wives, their
children were all liquidated, that is, cremated, within hours of arrival. Even if
they wound up on the right-hand side, as fit for work, they could only have
sustained the ordeal for three or four months at most before being selected and
disappearing into the flames of the crematoria.
Even with the consciousness of all these horrors – accepted out of apathy
or mere habituation, I do not know – even with the heavy burden of despair at
their own fate, they strive with selfless dedication to help the walking dead
who come into their hands. For indeed the patients in the hospital are the
walking dead. You have to be very sick to be admitted to the hospital in the
K.Z.
Withered to the bone, starved down to 30 kg, they are true walking skele-
tons, bellies fearfully bloated from hunger, mouths full of sores, implacably
gripped by diarrhea, dried-up, yellow-skinned shadows of men. Their bodies
are covered with disgusting, rampantly spreading phlegmons and festering ab-
scesses. Such are the patients in the hospital of the K.Z.! It is these that we
must help!
Chapter IV
I still do not have a job to do. I look around a bit at Camp “F” in the company
of a French doctor. One thing that immediately catches my interest is a shed-
like structure attached to one side of Barracks 12. It is made of rough-sawn
planks, and a man-length table, a chair, a wooden box with compartments con-
taining dissecting instruments, and a zinc bucket in one corner constitute its
only inner furnishings. As my colleague informs me, it is an out-of-service
dissecting room, the only one in the entire camp. They used to use it long ago.
Currently he does not even know of a specialist able to do autopsies in the
camp. It’s not out of the question, however, that my presence here might de-
pend on some plan of Dr. Mengele’s and that my arrival thus means the return
to operation of the dissecting room.
That latter possibility cools my enthusiasm somewhat. I had imagined a
modern dissection hall as the scene for my activities, not this shed in a con-
centration camp. In all my career, not even at rural exhumation sites or while
doing obligatory autopsies at suicide or murder sites have I ever performed
my work in such primitive circumstances with such inadequate instruments.
I have an accommodating temperament, however, and I can adapt to this
situation too. After all, in the K.Z. this is a first-rate assignment! What I don’t
understand is just why they gave me a new set of civilian clothes only to have
me do my work in a filthy shed. I see a certain contradiction there, but I don’t

worry my head too much over it.
I look across the wire fence with my colleague. In the next section of the
camp I see dark-faced children at play, running about naked, their voices
buzzing. Women with brightly colored clothes and racially mixed features,
half-naked men, old and young, who sit jumbled together on the ground, or
stand in groups talking or watching the children at play. This is the famous
Gypsy camp! The racial science of the Third Reich has declared Gypsies an
inferior people, harmful from a race-hygienic point of view. On the basis of
this classification, they have been dragged here from all the territories under
the German Reich and made prisoners of the K.Z. Because they are Catholic,
they enjoy the advantage of living in the family camp. Old, young, children,
all mixed up together, wherever they want to be. There are around 4,500 of
them. They do no work; the only service they provide is to act as barrack and
camp overseers in the Jewish barracks in the adjacent section of the camp, a
task they perform with a cruelty surpassing human imagination.
The Gypsy camp has a point of special interest, the experimental barracks
[kísérleti barakk] located there. Professor Dr. Epstein, professor publicus or-
dinarius at the University of Prague and a pediatrician of world renown, is
chief of the research lab. He has been a prisoner of the K.Z. for four years al-
ready. His assistant is Dr. Bendel, lecturer in the faculty of medicine at Paris.
The experiments underway there are divided into three groups. The first is
twin studies, which have recently become fashionable around the world due to
the birth of the Canadian quintuplets.34 The second is an inquiry into the phys-
iological and pathological causes of dwarfism. The third is a study of noma
faciei, or so called water cancer35, a gangrenous disease of the face, seeking to
identify its cause and to develop related medical treatments.
In normal practice one sees this terrible disease only very rarely. All the
more reason to study it here, then, since it occurs en masse among the children
of the Gypsy camp. Indeed this fact provided the initial impetus for the re-
search, the concrete results of which will be groundbreaking findings for med-
ical science.
Hereditary syphilis [syphilis] is detected in the majority of the Gypsy chil-
dren. Typhus [typhus], diphtheria [dyphtheria], scarlet fever [sarlach], mea-
sles [kanyaró] and even malnutrition are merely cofactors which prepare a fer-
tile ground for the development of noma, but only among the children of the
Gypsy camp, for these same ground-preparing factors are the order of the day
among the children in the Czech, Polish and Jewish sectors of the camp as
34
Nyiszli here refers to the birth of the Dionne quintuplets in Canada in 1934; their survival was a
medical first and created an international sensation.
35
Nyiszli here uses the word vízirák, a direct translation of Wasserkrebs (“water cancer”), a German
lay term for noma faciei. In English the disease is also referred to by the names cancrum oris and
gangrenous stomatitis.
well. Noma has not, however, been demonstrated in the absence of hereditary
syphilis during the course of the research. It thus appears indisputable that
noma is related in some way to hereditary syphilis. This finding is with con-
trast to the prevailing medical view according to which noma appears above
all in connection with measles, scarlet fever and typhus.
On the basis of this general conclusion a treatment method has been devel-
oped which promises a certain cure; it consists of a combination of neosal-
varsan and inoculation with malaria.
Dr. Mengele visits the experimental barracks every day. He takes part in
the research with keen interest, working together with two prominent doctors
and a painter named Dina36 who prepares, with great skill, the drawings need-
ed for the work. She is from Prague, and she has been in the Czech camp for
three years. As Dr. Mengele’s associate, she enjoys certain advantages. She is
counted among the “prominent”!
Chapter V
Dr. Mengele, chief physician of K.Z. Auschwitz [az auschwitzi K.Z. első or-
vosa], is indefatigable in the exercise of his duties. He spends long hours at
the experimental barracks in the Gypsy camp immersed in his work. He stands
half the day on the Judenrampe37, where already four to five trainloads of de-
ported Hungarians are arriving per day.
The transports march past, one after the other, in long lines five abreast,
under SS escort. They are marching far from where I stand, but even through
three or four layers of barbed-wire fencing I can see by their elegant attire, by
their long coats and smart-looking hand luggage, that they have been hauled
out of some large city where they had created a life of culture and prosperity
for all. That was their crime!
Still, Dr. Mengele has time to find work for me as well. A long hand-drawn
cart pulls up before the dissection shed. The corpse-transport team unloads
two bodies from the cart. Written on their chests, in blue-colored chalk, are
the letters Z.S., an abbreviation for zur Sektion.38 And that means: to be dis-
sected! I get the barracks overseer to assign me an intelligent French prisoner
from Barracks 12, and with his help I place one of the bodies on the table. It
has heavy, black wire cable around its neck. This one either hanged himself,
or was hanged. I make a summary examination of the second corpse as well. I
immediately recognize the signs of death by high-voltage electrocution. It is
easily recognizable by the small round crusts of burnt skin, as well as by the
36
Dinah Gottliebová.
37
Nyiszli here uses the word zsidórámpa, a direct translation of German Judenrampe (“Jews’
ramp”), an informal name for the railway ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where trains carrying de-
portees arrived.
38
In German in the original (“for dissection”).
reddish-purplish discoloration of the skin around them. Here again I ask my-
self which of two cases it might be: did he run against the electrified fence of
his own will, or was he thrown into it? In the K.Z. both alternatives are equal-
ly common.
Whether suicide or murder, the formalities to be observed are the same. At
evening roll call the deceased is stricken from the roll, the body is loaded onto
the corpse-transport cart and taken to the mortuary. From there, a truck carries
some fifty to sixty bodies per day to one of the crematoria.
Dr. Mengele has assigned the two corpses to me as a test. He tells me be-
forehand that I should be careful to live up to what I have undertaken. I will be
careful.
An automobile roars outside, within Barracks 12 the command rings out:
“Attention!” Dr. Mengele has arrived, accompanied by two high-ranking SS
officers. They listen to the reports of the barracks overseer and the head phy-
sician. Then they make straight for the dissection room, the prominent inmate
doctors of Camp F behind them. They stand in attendance as if in the anatomi-
cal theater of a great scientific institute as a particularly interesting case goes
under the scalpel. I see on their faces an intense interest in the autopsy, as well
as curiosity regarding my own competence. I am to undergo an examination
before an exalted – and rather perilous – tribunal. I feel almost as if my pris-
oner colleagues are worried for me.
Apart from myself, no one here knows that for three years, working direct-
ly from corpses, I studied every form of suicide as assistant to His Excellency
Professor Dr. Strassmann [Prof. dr. Strassmann őexcellenciája] at the Institute
of Forensic Medicine in Breslau [Boroszló]. What I knew then, present-day
prisoner number A-8450, doctor of the K.Z., knows too.
I get down to work on the dissection: I open the cranium, the thoracic cavi-
ty, the abdominal cavity. I extract all the organs, demonstrate all the anomalies
present. I rapidly answer the various questions that crop up frequently as I
work. The look of satisfied interest on their faces and the friendly glances they
send toward me convince me that my examination has gone well. I dissect the
second corpse also. Dr. Mengele instructs me to prepare reports on the autop-
sies. He will send for them tomorrow. The SS doctors depart. I remain chat-
ting with my fellow inmate doctors. Up till now they have been courteous to-
ward me; now they accept me into the circle of the prominent.
The next day I receive three more corpses for autopsy. My audience today
is the same, but the mood is more relaxed. I am a known quantity now. Today
there is more interest, more breaking in with comments, and a lively discus-
sion arises concerning the solution of a certain scientific question.
After the departure of the SS doctors, some young Greek and French doc-
tors come to meet me. They ask me to introduce them to the techniques of
lumbar puncture. They want me to let them practice on the corpses. I gladly
comply with their request. I am deeply impressed that even here, behind the
barbed wire of the K.Z., they manifest such a lively interest in the profession.
They practice diligently, and after five or six attempts the lumbar puncture is a
success. They depart proudly, faces beaming.
Chapter VI
For three days now I have had no work to do. I receive the rations due to a
doctor; I relax on my bunk, or sit on a bench in the sports field located next to
Camp “F.” Yes, such a thing exists in Concentration Camp Auschwitz, but on-
ly the Prominente, German prisoners from the Reich, may use it. On Sundays,
there is lively sports activity here. The rest of the week, the great field is si-
lent. Just a single wire fence separates it from Crematorium I. I would love to
know what is going on at the foot of its gigantic, blazing chimney [lángoló,
oriasi kémény]. From where I am sitting I can’t see very much. To approach
the fence would not be advisable, for a hail of automatic gunfire will be sent
down without warning from the closely spaced watchtowers upon anyone who
blunders into the dead zone [a neutrális zónába].
All I can see is that men in civilian clothes are lining up in the crematorium
courtyard before the big, red-brick building. There might be two hundred of
them. In front of the group stand a few SS soldiers. I presume that roll call and
headcount is underway there. They are changing the crematorium personnel,
day shift replacing night shift. Work goes on in the crematorium without inter-
ruption night and day. From an old prisoner, I learn that the crematoria per-
sonnel are classified as Sonderkommando, that is, a Kommando assigned to
special work. They get excellent food and excellent civilian clothing. In re-
turn, they do the most horrible of jobs. They are not permitted to leave the
crematorium compound, and every four months [négyhavonként], when they
have become familiar with its many secrets, they are liquidated. So it has been
for every Sonderkommando for as long as the K.Z. has existed. No one has
ever yet escaped from those terrible buildings to tell the world of what has
been going on, for years now, within their walls.
I return to Barracks 12 just in time to encounter Dr. Mengele. He arrives in
an automobile. He is greeted by the barracks overseer. He sends for me! He
tells me to get in! This time I do not have an escort. I cannot even say good-
bye to my colleagues. We set off, but then stop in front of the camp office. Dr.
Mengele calls Dr. Sentkeller hurrying over, and asks him for my card. Mo-
ments later it is in his hands.
For ten minutes we move among the maze of fences, through gates, heavily
guarded front and back, from one part of the camp to another. Only now do I
see just how enormous in scale the K.Z. is! Very few prisoners ever have the
chance to see this, for the majority of them perish in the same sector of the
camp they first arrive in. At times Auschwitz Concentration Camp has held
prisoner as many as 500,000 people [500.000 embert] within its electrified
barbed wire. My reflections are abruptly interrupted by Dr. Mengele. He calls

back to me: “It’s no sanatorium where I’m taking you, but it will be a quite
tolerable position.”
We exit the camp and proceed along the Judenrampe for three hundred
meters. The car slows, the horn sounds. A large iron gate opens in the fence.
Beside the gate stands a guard post. We pass through and arrive in a spacious,
well-kept courtyard covered with green lawn. The sandy pathways and green
fir groves [fenyőlugasok] of the courtyard would make it a welcoming place
were it not for the large red-brick building there and the enormous, flame-
spewing chimney [óriási, tűzokádó kémény] at one end. We are at one of the
crematoria! We get out of the car! An SS hurries over briskly, presents him-
self to Dr. Mengele. Crossing the courtyard, we pass through a large door into
the crematorium building. “Is the room ready?” Dr. Mengele asks our SS es-
cort. The latter answers yes, and we make our way there directly. They enter, I
follow behind them. We are in a freshly whitewashed room. Overlooking the
courtyard is a large bright window with heavy iron bars over it. The furniture
of the room makes an almost weird impression after the barracks room in the
camp. A white bed, a white wardrobe, a long table and some chairs make up
the room’s furnishings. On the table is a red velvet tablecloth, and underfoot,
on the concrete floor, are splendid carpets. I see they’ve been expecting me.
The men of the Sonderkommando have painted the room and furnished it from
the chairs and tables and tablecloths left behind by the transports who have
been destroyed here, along with a pinewood bed made in the local woodwork-
ing shop [házi asztalosműhelyben] and a wardrobe.
From there, passing through a long, dark corridor, we arrive in another
room. We are in a bright, double-windowed dissection hall of the most mod-
ern type. The floor is of reddish concrete, and in the middle of the room, on a
grey concrete base, stands a marble-slab dissecting table with numerous drain-
age canals cut into its surface. Installed near the edge of the table is a tub with
nickel-plated taps. Three porcelain sinks are mounted along the wall. The
walls are painted with a light-green, oil-based paint. In the windows, behind
the iron bars, green-meshed screens keep the flies and mosquitos out.
From the dissection hall we step into the room next door. This is the labor-
atory [munkaterem], an elegant room fitted out with gleaming furniture. In the
middle of the room stand comfortable armchairs and a long worktable covered
with a gray cloth. On the table I count three microscopes. A broad, tall book-
case stands in one corner, filled with technical works in the latest editions. A
glass cabinet also stands in the room, full of chemicals. On top of all that,
there is a linen closet containing gowns, aprons, towels and rubber gloves.
What unfolds before me is a perfect replica of the anatomical institute of a big
modern city.
I try to take this all in, but I am paralyzed with terror. I had realized imme-
diately, even as I passed through the main gate, that I was passing along the
way toward death. Toward a slow death, yawning before me in its dizzying,
bottomless depths. I feel it, I am done for.
Now I understand why I received civilian clothes. They are worn only by
the Sonderkommando, the Kommando of the walking dead.
My boss prepares to leave. He advises the SS that, with regard to my du-
ties, I am subordinate to him alone. The crematorium’s SS personnel have no
authority over my person. My meals will be provided by the SS kitchen. I may
supplement my clothes and linens from the storeroom. For haircuts and shaves
I may go to the SS barber shop found in the crematorium building. I do not
have to be present at morning and evening roll call!
Apart from anatomical and laboratory work, I am required to provide med-
ical attention for the 120-man-strong SS contingent assigned to the four crem-
atoria, as well as for the 860-man-strong Sonderkommando. The necessary
medicines, instruments and dressings are at my disposal in sufficient quanti-
ties. For ongoing patient care, I am required to visit the individual crematoria
once per day – and in case of necessity, even twice – to call on the sick where
they lie. I am free to come and go among the four crematoria. I may move
about without any escort from 7 in the morning until 9 at night. Every day I
must report the number of bedbound and ambulatory sick to the commander
of the SS and Sonderkommando units, Oberscharführer Mussfeld.
I listen, paralyzed, to the list of my rights and duties. Under such terms I
would be the leading Prominente of the K.Z., were it not that I am to be part
of the Sonderkommando and that all this is to happen within Krema I.39
Dr. Mengele departs without saying farewell. An SS, even of the lowliest
rank, does not exchange greetings with a prisoner of the K.Z. I close the door
of the dissection hall, taking the keys with me. I am responsible for everything
here now.
I go to my room and sit down to collect my thoughts somewhat. A difficult
task! I start at the beginning. The image of my abandoned home rises before
me, the sunny little house on the terrace with its pleasant rooms where I
passed so many difficult hours caring for my patients – difficult, but with the
satisfaction of being able to help – and so many happy hours surrounded by
my family.
It has been a week already since we were separated; where could they be, I
wonder, in this hundred thousand-headed throng, nameless, like everyone else
locked up in this gigantic prison? Has my fifteen-year-old daughter managed
to stay with her mother? Have they been separated from each other? What will
become of my aged parents, for whom I have worked, with so much love, to
make their twilight years carefree? What will become of my little sister, love-
39
“… nem lenne mindez a Krema I-ben.” Nyiszli here uses the Auschwitz camp slang Krema I, short
for Krematorium I. Modern scholarship now identifies this building as Krematorium II, saving the
name Krematorium I for the disused crematorium at the Auschwitz main camp.
ly, gentle-hearted girl, to whom I have been a father in place of our sickly fa-
ther? How good it was to love them, how good it was to help them! Not for a
moment do I doubt their fate. They too are en route, in one of the trains made
up of forty ramshackle wagons, here to the death camp Auschwitz – to the
Judenrampe – where, at a mechanical gesture from my learned boss Dr.
Mengele, my parents will turn to the left, and my little sister also, to the left,
for even if the judgment for her should say to the right, she undoubtedly will
ask, hands joined in supplication, that they permit her to go with our mother.
They will grant her permission and she will thank them for it with warm
words and with tears in her eyes.
News of my arrival has spread quickly among the SS personnel of the
crematoria and among the Sonderkommando. They come to my room to call
upon me, one after the other. Some SS NCOs open the door. Two grimly mar-
tial Oberscharführers of enormous stature enter. I know that my demeanor at
this moment will determine their future attitude toward me. I think of Dr.
Mengele’s order, I am subordinate only to him! Accordingly, I treat the visit
as strictly private in nature, an act of courtesy. I do not leap up, as per K.Z.
regulations, to present myself standing at attention, but rather remain seated;
thus welcoming them, I invite them to sit down.
They stop in the middle of room and stare, sizing me up intently. I sense
the importance of the moment. Now I face the test of first impressions! It ap-
pears I don’t do badly, for the muscles over their high cheekbones lose their
rigid tension, and with a nonchalant motion they sit down.
Our conversation moves within a very narrow ambit. How was my jour-
ney? How did I wind up in the K.Z.? They cannot ask such questions, for my
answers might embarrass them. And of politics, the war, the conditions pre-
vailing in the K.Z., of these things I cannot speak. But I am not flustered, for
my years of study in Germany before the war provide plenty of material for
discussion.
We become completely absorbed in conversation. It impresses them that I
speak their language more perfectly than they do. They do not even under-
stand some of my expressions, though they try to avoid showing it. I know
them well: their country, their cities, their family life, their moral and religious
conceptions. The conversation is not difficult for me. I can see that my oral
examination has gone well, for they leave smiling.
Other visitors arrive. Men in civil clothes, neatly groomed and shaven. The
head Kapo40 of the Sonderkommando and two Kommando leaders41 enter my
room. Another courtesy call! They’re the ones who arranged my room with
their men; they’d heard of my arrival, they invite me to dinner so I can get to
know the rest of the crew as well.
40
“Főkapója,” a direct Hungarian translation of German Hauptkapo (“head Kapo”).
41
“Kommandóvezető,” for German Kommandoführer (“Kommando leader”).
Just then it was indeed time for dinner. I go with them up to the first floor42
of the crematorium, to the quarters arranged for the personnel there. It is an
enormous hall, lined on either side with comfortable single beds. The bunks
are made of unpainted wood, but each is richly covered with cushions and silk
coverlets in different styles and colors. This brilliantly colorful bedding stands
in sharp, even jarring contrast with the surroundings. It was never meant for
this place! It is from the belongings left by the transports brought here. Such is
the privilege of the Sonderkommando that they could take such things from
the storerooms and use them.
The whole room is flooded with dazzling light. They do not economize on
lighting here like in the barracks of the K.Z. We pass between the long rows
of beds. Only half of the Kommando is in the quarters, the other half, one
hundred men, is on the night shift. They are at work. Of the men here, some
are already lying down, or even asleep. Some are reading books. There are
plenty of them! We are a book-reading people! Every deportee brings a few,
each according to his or her intellectual level. But this too is a privilege, the
fact that the Sonderkommando can keep books for themselves and read them.
In the K.Z. it’s twenty days in the standing cell for anyone caught reading, if
they don’t just beat you to death.
The table is waiting for us spread with a silk-brocade cloth. Fine, mono-
grammed china, silver tableware, porcelain jugs, this too is all stuff from the
transports. The table is piled with every delicacy, all that a deported people
have brought with them on an uncertain journey. There are preserves, smoke-
cured bacon [szalonna], salami, marmalades, pastries, chocolate. From the la-
bels I see that these things are provisions left behind by Hungarian deportees.
Perishable foods pass, by right of office, to any legitimate successors still
among the living, that is, to the Sonderkommando. Sitting around the table are
the head Kapo, the engineer, the chief stoker, the captain of the tooth-pulling
Kommando, the director of the gold refinery. The welcome they extend is a
hearty one. They offer generously from everything they have. There’s more
where it came from! The transports from Hungary keep coming one after an-
other. They bring plenty of everything!
I swallow each mouthful with difficulty. I can’t help thinking of my com-
panions in fate, driven from their homes, who in the last hours before deporta-
tion had gathered together or prepared provisions for the journey while shed-
ding bitter tears. They had suffered from hunger, but they ate nothing along
the entire way in order to have something in reserve for their elderly parents
and for their children should harder days come later. But harder days never
42
In the European manner, “first floor” (első emelet) here refers to the first floor above ground level,
i.e., the second floor of American English. Nyiszli’s room is on the ground level.
came! The food was left here, untouched, in the undressing room43 of the
crematorium.
I drink tea with rum. After a few glasses my internal tensions subside com-
pletely. My mind is purged, liberated from its tormenting thoughts, my whole
body becomes enlivened. A pleasing warmth flows through me. I am drunk. I
can feel the alcohol’s intoxicating work. Its effect is like a mother’s caressing
hand, as if benevolence is raining down upon me. We smoke fine cigarettes,
also from the Hungarian transports. In the camp itself the price of a cigarette is
a ration of bread. Here there are hundreds lying in packages on the table. We
carry on a lively conversation. Represented are Poland, France, Greece, Rus-
sia, Germany, Italy. The talk proceeds in German, as everyone understands it.
Over the course of our conversation I learn the history of the crematoria.
How tens of thousands of prisoners [fegyencek tízezrei] built these gigantic
buildings out of stone and concrete. How they had to complete them in harsh
winter weather. Every stone in these buildings is stained with the blood of tens
of thousands of unlucky Jewish deportees [tíz és tízezer szerencsétlen zsidó
deportált]. Starved and thirsty, inadequately clothed, nourished with wretched
gruel as their only food, they toiled day and night so that these horrid factories
of death could be completed and become the cremators of their own bodies.
Since then four years [négy év] have passed. Millions and millions [millió és
millió] of people have stepped down off the trains onto the ramp and passed
through the doors of the crematoria. This current group is the twelfth
Sonderkommando [a XII-ik Sonderkommandó]! I get to know the history of
each Kommando. I get to know the names of their heroes and I confirm what I
have already heard in the camp as well, that the life of a Sonderkommando
lasts only a few months.
Whoever is of the Jewish faith can begin, from the day of his arrival here,
the rites for purification before death. For his death will surely come, as it has
for every Sonderkommando until now.
It’s nearly midnight, the members of the dinnertime company are worn out
from the day’s work, woozy from all the alcohol they’ve consumed. Our con-
versation becomes more and more halting. An SS guard doing the rounds
warns us quietly that it would be best for all of us to hit the sack. I say good-
night, and I too head off to sleep.
Thanks to the strong rum I sleep through my first night relatively quietly,
though it helps as well that I’m in a state of complete nervous exhaustion.
43
The Hungarian text here has “vetkező-termében,” an evident spelling error. The word vétkező
means “sinner” from vétkezik “to sin”; the correct term is vetkőző “undressing.”
Chapter VII
The long-drawn-out wail of a locomotive’s whistle sounds from the ramp. It’s
daybreak! I go to my window, where I have a clear view across. A long train
is standing there. Within a few minutes, the doors are flung to one side and the
wagons disgorge from within themselves the chosen people of Israel [Izrael
kiválasztott népét]. Lining up and selection take half an hour at most. The left-
hand column sets off at a slow march.
From my room I hear loud orders, hurried footsteps. The noise is coming
from the furnace hall [kazánterem] of the crematorium! They are making
preparations for receiving the transport. The whine of electric motors becomes
audible. They have turned on the giant blowers [óriási ventillátorokat] which
fan the fire [a tüzet élesztik] to the proper temperature inside the furnaces
[kazánokban]. Fifteen blowers of this kind [tizenöt ilyen ventillátor] are in op-
eration at once! One is installed next to each furnace [minden kemence mellé
van egy építve]. The cremation hall [égetőterem] is about 150 meters long
[százötven méter hosszú], a brightly lit, white-washed, concrete-floored space
with enormous, iron-barred windows. The fifteen cremation furnaces [égőka-
zán] are installed separately [külön-külön] in large red-brick structures. Their
massive iron doors, polished to a gleam, run in a sinister line down the length
of the hall.
After five or six minutes the transport arrives at the gate, the gate’s leaves
swing open. The procession enters the courtyard in the customary rows of
five. This is the phase of the process which nobody knows about, for of all
those who might know, having walked the three hundred meters here from the
ramp along the path to their doom, none has ever returned to tell the story!
This, then, is what “to the left” means: one of the crematoria! Not a camp for
old folks, invalids and children, where those unable to work will care for the
little ones, as the German disinformation spread among the anxious group that
winds up on the right would have it.
They walk with slow, weary movements. The little children cling sleepily
to their mothers’ skirts. Babies in swaddling clothes are for the most part car-
ried in their fathers’ arms, or pushed in buggies. The SS escort remains out-
side the gate. According to the text of a warning sign, entry is forbidden to
outsiders, even SS!
In an instant they spot the taps installed in the courtyard for irrigation pur-
poses. Pots and other vessels are brought forth. The column dissolves and,
pushing and shoving, they rush to fill them. No wonder they’re so impatient!
For five days they have scarcely drunk any water. What they did drink was
foul and could not quench their thirst.
The SS guards who receive the transport are used to this scene. They wait
patiently until everyone has quenched their thirst and filled their vessels. Until
all have drunk, they cannot bring the group to order. Slowly they herd them
back together again. They proceed about a hundred meters along a cinder path
bordered with green lawns until they reach a grey-painted iron railing [míg
egy szürkére festett vaskorláthoz érnek] where ten or twelve concrete steps
lead below the ground to a large room, upon the façade of which hangs an
enormous sign stating, in German, French, Greek and Hungarian, that this is a
“Bath and Disinfection Room.”44 The unsuspecting are lulled of course, but
even the doubtful are too. They go down the steps almost cheerfully.
The room into which the transport is conducted is about 200 meters long
[körülbelül kétszát méter hosszú], starkly illuminated and painted white. A
line of columns stretches down the middle of the room to the end. Benches are
arranged around each column and along the walls as well. Above the benches
are long lines of hooks, above the hooks are numbers. Advisory signs posted
at frequent intervals announce in each language that one’s clothing and shoes,
tied together, should be placed on a hook. And their number should be noted
without fail, so that no unnecessary confusion arises upon returning from the
bath! “This is real German orderliness!” say those inclined to German-
worship from the old days. They’re right, too! It really is for the sake of order,
so that all these thousands of high-quality shoes, so hard to find in the Third
Reich, do not get mixed up together. The same goes for the clothes as well, so
that they remain usable by the bombed-out German population.
Three thousand people [háromezer ember] are in the room. Men, women,
children. SS soldiers arrive and immediately the order rings out: everyone is to
undress completely, ten minutes! They stand petrified, old folks, grandfathers,
grandmothers, children, wives, husbands. Modest matrons and maidens look
at one another helplessly. Perhaps they did not understand the German words
[a német szavakat]? But already the order is repeated! Its tone is more impa-
tient now, almost menacing!
They are filled with foreboding, their pride is stirred, but with Jewish res-
ignation they recognize that, with regard to themselves, anything is permitted!
They begin to undress with difficulty. A group sent from the Sonderkomman-
do assists in the undressing of the aged, the lame and the mad. In ten minutes
everyone is naked. Their clothing hangs on the hooks, along with their shoes,
laces tied together. And their hook numbers have been carefully noted…!
The SS clear a path through the dense crowd to the oak double doors locat-
ed at the end of the room. They open them! The crowd surges through them
into the next room, also brightly lit. This room is the same size [olyan nagy-
ságú] as the undressing room [vetkezőterem], but there are no benches and
hooks here. In the center of the room, at a distance of thirty meters from each
other [egymástól harminc méter távolságra], a number of columns stretch
from the concrete floor to the ceiling. These are not support columns, but are
44
“Fürdő és fertőtlenitő helyiség.” This thus must have been the inscription in Hungarian.
rather quadrangular tinplate pipes [négyszögletű vasbádog csövek], their sides

pierced throughout with holes like a grill.
Everyone is inside now! A loud command rings out! – SS and Sonderkom-
mando are to leave the room! – They leave and take a head count. The doors
[az ajtók] close, the lights are turned off from outside.
At that moment, an automobile roars outside. A luxury model Red Cross
car [vöröskeresztes luxuskocsi] arrives. An SS officer and an S.D.G. Sani-
tätsdienstgefreiter,45 a non-commissioned medical officer, step out. The medic
has four green-colored canisters in his hands.
They advance across the lawn to where some low concrete chimneys
emerge from the ground [földből] at a distance of thirty meters from one an-
other [egymástól harminc méterre]. They head for the first chimney. They don
gas masks. They lift the chimney cover; it too is made of concrete [betonból].
They punch open the patented top46 of one of the canisters and pour the con-
tents, a substance consisting of bean-sized lilac-colored [lila színű] granules,
into the opening. The material poured out is Cyclon, or chlorine in granular
form [Cyclon, vagy Chlór szemcsés formája]; it immediately gives off gas as
soon as it comes into contact with air [amint a levegővel érintkezik]. It falls
down into the perforated sheet-metal pipes [lyukacsos bádogcsöve(k)] into the
underground room. It stays there in the pipe; it does not scatter all over. The
gas immediately comes out through the holes, and within moments [pillanatok
alatt] it fills the room crowded with people. Within five minutes [öt perc
alatt] it kills them!47
The Red Cross car comes like this to every transport, bringing the gas from
the outside. No supply of it is ever kept in the crematorium. A despicable pre-
caution, but more despicable still is the fact that they should bring it in a car
marked with the insignia of the International Red Cross!
The two gas executioners wait five more minutes, to be sure of their work.
They light cigarettes and get into their car. They have just killed three thou-
sand innocent people!
Twenty minutes later, the electric ventilators [a villamos szellőztetőket] are
switched on to remove the gas. The doors [az ajtók] open. Trucks arrive now
too. A Sonderkommando group loads clothing and shoes separately onto the
trucks. They’re taking them away to disinfect them! To the real disinfection
now! From there, they go by train to various centers around the country.
The modern, exhaustor-system fans [az exhaustor rendszerű, modern
szellőztetők] quickly clear the room of gas, but it remains present, if in small
quantities, trapped in cracks, among the dead. Even hours later [még órák
45
In German in the original along with the abbreviation.
46
Nyiszli’s “patent top” (patent tetejét) presumably is his translation of German Patentdeckel, a
trade term for a lid with a flattened concave profile, like that of a paint can.
47
Or “it is finished!” The Hungarian verb végez literally means “to finish,” but like its English
equivalent (cf. “to finish off”) it also means, colloquially, “to kill.”
múlva] breathing it provokes a suffocating cough. For this reason, the Sonder-
squad [Sonderesosztag] enter with rubber syringes48 and wear gas masks. The
room is once more starkly illuminated. A terrible spectacle unfolds before
those who enter.
The bodies do not lie all over the length and breadth of the room but rather
in a single, story-high heap [hanem emeletmagasan egyhalomban]. The expla-
nation for this is that the fallen gas granules first permeate the air layer above
the concrete floor with their deadly vapors and only gradually [fokozatosan]
saturate the higher layers of air in the room. This forces the unfortunate vic-
tims to trample each other, to climb over one another. In the higher layers the
gas thus reaches them later [A magasban így későbben éri el a gáz őket]. What
a terrible struggle for life must take place there, and yet the time won is only
one or two minutes in all! Could they but think about it, they would know that
they are trampling their parents, their wives, their children in vain, but they
cannot! What they do is a survival reflex! I notice that at the bottom of the
tower of bodies [hullatoronynak] lie the babies, children, women and aged, at
the top, the stronger men.
Tangled together, their bodies covered with bloody scratches which they
caused one another in the scramble, they lie with bleeding noses, bleeding
mouths. Their heads are swollen and blue [kékre van dagadva], deformed be-
yond all recognition! All the same, the Sonderkommandos often recognize
their relatives among the dead. I myself dread the horror of such an encounter!
There is no work for me here, and yet I have come down among the dead, be-
cause I feel a sense of duty to my people and to the world, that, while I cannot
reasonably hope it, yet through some trick of fate I may escape from here and
write these lines as the only living witness!
The Sonderkommando group stands around the mountain of corpses [hul-
lahegy körül] in tall rubber boots and flushes it with powerful streams of wa-
ter. There is great need of this, for the last act of death by asphyxiation, and
thus death by gas, is the release of excrement from the bowels. All of the dead
are filthy with it!
After the “bathing” of the dead is accomplished – and with what spiritual
abnegation, what complete self-surrender the Sonderkommando performs this
task! – next begins the pulling apart of the tangled-together corpses. It is a
very difficult job! They loop straps around the wrists below the spasmodically
clenched fists, and so drag the bodies of the dead, still slippery with water, to
the elevators in the next room. Four large mechanical freight elevators are in
operation here [Négy nagy teherfelvonógép műkökik itt]. They pile the dead
onto these, twenty, twenty-five to an elevator. An alarm bell informs the oper-
ator that it can ascend! The elevator stops at the cremation hall [égetőtermé-
48
I.e., bulb syringes, presumably to blow contaminated air out of the spaces it is trapped in and thus
disperse it.
ben] of the crematorium, where its massive doors open automatically. The
towing Kommando [a vontató kommandó] is waiting for it there. Once again,
loops go around the wrists of the dead. They drag them along the concrete
floor on a slide made for the purpose and deposit them in front of the fifteen
furnaces [a 15 kemence előtt].
They lie in long lines on the concrete, the corpses of old and young and
children alike. Blood trickles from their noses and their mouths, as well as
from their bodies, abraded from the dragging, and mixes with the continuously
flowing water which trickles from taps installed for that purpose through
channels in the concrete floor.
Then follows a new phase in the exploitation of the Jews’ corpses. The
Third Reich has already seized their clothing, their shoes. Hair is a valuable
material too. It is essential for delayed action bombs, as hair is a fiber which
expands and contracts uniformly in both dry and humid air. This capacity is
brought to bear in the detonator mechanism of the bombs. And so the dead are
shorn.
The Third Reich is founded on the value not of gold but of work! They say
it and shout it to the whole world. Here’s the truth! The eight men of the
tooth-pulling Kommando [a foghúzó kommandó] stand before the furnaces,
two kinds of tool, or rather “instruments,” in their hands. In one hand, a crow-
bar, in the other, tooth-pulling pliers. They turn the bodies face upward, open
the mouths, and with horrid workmanship ruthlessly proceed to not so much
pull out as smash out any gold teeth and bridges they can find in the oral cavi-
ty. And yet the men of the Kommando are all qualified dentists and oral sur-
geons! It was as such that Dr. Mengele recruited them for the performance of
challenging dental and oral-surgical duties. They had hoped for a good posi-
tion in their own professions! They had presented themselves and fallen into
the hell of the crematorium. Exactly as it happened to me!
The gold teeth wind up in a zinc bucket, where they sit in a hydrochloride
solution to burn off the bone and pieces of flesh. The other gold items found
on the dead, the platinum objects, the pearls, the necklaces, the rings all go in-
to a closed strongbox set aside for this purpose. They toss them through a hole
in the lid. Gold is a heavy metal; I would estimate 8-10 kilograms [nyolc-tíz
kilóra] is collected per day at one crematorium. Naturally it depends on the
transports as well. There are poor transports and there are rich transports, de-
pending on where they come from.
The Hungarian transports arrive at the ramp completely looted. The trans-
ports from Holland, Czechoslovakia and the various parts of Poland, even af-
ter years of life in the ghettos, have managed to keep and bring along their
jewels, their gold objects, their dollars. The Germans thus come into posses-
sion of immense riches.
After the last gold tooth is out of the mouth of its dead owner, the corpses
go to the cremation Kommando [a hamvasztó kommandohóz]. These then
place them three at a time [hármasával] on a pushing device made of steel

plates [egy acél lemezekből készült tolószerkezetre]. The furnace’s heavy iron
doors open automatically [automatikusan]; the device moving on iron wheels
rolls into the glowing furnace, drops its load, slides back, heated to incandes-
cence.49 Two men with rubber hoses douse it with powerful streams of water.
The bodies of the dead are reduced to ashes in 20 minutes [20 perc alatt
hamvadnak]. The crematorium works with 15 furnaces. This means the cre-
mation of 5,000 people a day [Ez napi ötezer ember egétését jelenti]. Four
crematoria are in operation at the same capacity [Négy krematórium dolgozik
ugyanilyen kapacitással]. Altogether 20,000 people [összesen 20.000 ember]
pass each day [naponta] through the gas chambers and from there into the
cremation furnaces. The souls of twenty-thousand innocent people fly off
through the gigantic chimneys. Nothing remains of them here but a heap of
ashes in the courtyard of the crematoria [a krematóriumok udvarán], which
trucks carry off to the Vistula, rushing along some two kilometers away, and
deliver to the waves. After so much suffering, so much horror, they are not
even granted the finality of rejoining and fading away into the earth.
Chapter VIII
The pathological anatomy laboratory was established at the initiative of my
boss, Dr. Mengele, and is intended to satisfy his medical research ambitions. It
has been finished for several days, waiting only for a forensic pathologist so
that it can begin operations.
Grand possibilities and wide vistas open here on the grounds of the K.Z.
for the forensic investigation of the frequently occurring cases of suicide, for
twin studies, for the pathological evaluation of developmental disorders such
as dwarfism and gigantism!
The abundance of corpse materials occurring nowhere else, and the possi-
bility of having corpses at one’s disposal without limit and without responsi-
bility give a great impetus to research work and afford ever greater possibili-
ties!
I know from experience that while the hospitals of major world cities are
able, with difficulty, to make available 100-150 corpses per year for research
purposes to forensic medical or anatomical institutes, they are available in
K.Z. Auschwitz in quantities calculable in the millions [milliós számokban]!
Anyone who enters the confines of the K.Z. is a candidate for death here.
Those whose good fortune takes them to the left become corpses in the gas
chambers within an hour. Less fortunate are those whose bad luck puts them
49
In the text of the 1947 edition, an entire line of text was dropped here, making the phrase nonsen-
sical: “a vaskerekeken járó szerkezet a kemence izzásig van hevítve” instead of “a vaskerekeken
járó szrkezet a kemence ízzó belsejébe gördül, ledobja terhét, ismét kicsúszik, izzásig van he-
vítve.”
on the right! The qualification of “candidates for death” applies to them as

well, only with the difference that, for three or four months, for as long as they
may hold out, they must suffer all the horrors of the K.Z. along the way. They
succumb to slave labor! They bleed from a thousand wounds. They cry out in
hunger. Losing their minds, they howl with staring eyes. They freeze to death
writhing in fields of snow. Trained bloodhounds tear off what flesh still re-
mains on them, and when even the lice no longer find nourishment on their
dried-up bodies, along comes redeeming death for them! Who has it better?
Who, among their fathers, their mothers, their brothers and sisters, their chil-
dren? The right side or the left?
Already upon the arrival of new transports an SS soldier goes along the
line of people assembled before the wagons and asks after the twins and dwa-
rves to find among them. The mothers, hoping for something good, hand over
their twin children without reflecting. The adult twins, for their part, know that
they are scientifically interesting. Only something good can come of that.
They present themselves willingly. This happens in the same way with the
dwarves.
They are separated out, they all go to the right. Guards accompany them,
still in their civilian clothes, which they are allowed to keep, to the barracks in
the camp specially designated for them, the so-called convalescence bar-
racks.50 Here the food is good, the beds are comfortable, there are washing fa-
cilities, the treatment is good.
They are in Barracks 14 of Sector “F” of the camp, and from there their
supervisor takes them to the previously mentioned experimental block in the
Gypsy camp. Here each day every medical test that can be done on living hu-
mans is performed. Blood tests, spinal taps, blood transfusions between twins,
and innumerable other tests, all of them painful and exhausting. Dina, the fe-
male painter and illustrator from Prague, prepares comparative drawings of
the twins’ skulls, ears, noses and mouths, and the lines on their hands and their
feet; each drawing goes into a separately created dossier containing detailed
personal data where the test-report pages prepared from the results of research
tests are kept as well. This is the procedure with the dwarves also.
These tests, known in medical terms as “in vivo,” that is, performed upon
the living, still are far from exhausting the possibilities of twin-research sci-
ence. They are full of gaps; they offer little! Thus follows the last and most
important phase of twin research, the anatomopathological evaluation! The
comparison, in twin siblings, of healthy and abnormally functioning or dis-
eased organs – for that study, as for every kind of anatomopathology, dead
bodies are needed! Since the autopsy must allow for the simultaneous evalua-
50
The expression kímélő barakk (literally “sparing barrack”), used here and four paragraphs below,
is likely Nyiszli’s translation of the German Schonungsbaracke (or Schonungsblock), a term used
in the camp system for a building where convalescent prisoners could rest and thus “spare” (scho-
nen) their health.
tion of detected anomalies, the twins have to die at the same time! And die
they do, in an experimental barracks of K.Z. Auschwitz, in Sector B.III of the
camp [a B.III. táborrészben], by the hand of Dr. Mengele.
Here occurs a situation unique in all the world in the history of medical
science! Twins die together, at the same time, and there is the possibility of
subjecting them both to an autopsy! Where in free life does the marvelous sit-
uation ever arise that twins should die together at the same time? Even twins
are separated by their life circumstances. Often they live at a great distance
from one another and they are not accustomed to die together, but rather one
dies at ten and the other at fifty, to speak by way of example. There is no pos-
sibility, thus, of a comparative autopsy! In the Auschwitz camp there are
many hundreds of twins, with many hundreds of possibilities!
For this Dr. Mengele separates out the twins and the dwarves while still on
the ramp. For this they go to the right, to the convalescence barracks! For this
their excellent provisions! For this they are able to wash themselves, so that
they should not die ahead of one another by contracting different diseases!
They must die in good health and at the same time!
The head Kapo of the Sonderkommando comes to me to report that an SS
soldier is waiting at the crematorium gate with a corpse-transport Kommando.
I go out to the waiting group. They are not permitted to enter the courtyard. I
receive the accompanying documents from the SS soldier. I take in hand the
dossier of two twins. The Kommando, which is made up of women, places a
blanket-covered stretcher before me. I lift the blanket. It covers the bodies of
two two-year-old twins. I call over two of my Sonderkommando men to carry
the bodies in and place them on the dissecting table.
I open the dossiers and leaf through them. State-of-the-art clinical exami-
nations, write-ups, photographs, X-rays and artistic drawings give back a clear
reflection of the little twins’ gemellological features. All that is missing is the
autopsy report! Preparing it is my job! The two little twins have died together!
They lie side by side on the big dissecting table! By their deaths, by the suffi-
cient laying bare of their little bodies [testecskéjük]51 through dissection, they
must reveal the secret of the multiplication of the race!
Promoting the multiplication of the superior race chosen for mastery is a
“worthy goal.” By such means perhaps one day every German woman will
bear twins!
The plan is madness! Its formulators are the sick-brained racial theorists of
the Third Reich. The performance of the experiments has been entrusted to the
51
Or perhaps “their minutest parts.” Hungarian testescke is a diminutive of test (“body”), but is also
used to mean “corpuscle.”
chief physician of K.Z. Auschwitz, the highly trained “criminaldoctor”52 – that

is, criminal doctor53 – Dr. Mengele.
Among criminals and evil-doers, the most dangerous type of all is the
criminaldoctor! Especially with the kind of power that is placed in Dr.
Mengele’s hands! He sends millions [milliókat] to their deaths because ac-
cording to their [sic] racial theories54 they are inferior beings harmful to hu-
manity! This same criminal doctor sits for long hours beside me among the
microscopes, flasks and test tubes, or stands for long hours at the dissecting
table in a bloodstained lab coat, with bloody hands, and examines and re-
searches like one possessed! The goal is the multiplication of the German
race! The end goal, in turn, is that there should be enough Germans to replace
the Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Dutch peoples, condemned to extermination, in
the areas inhabited by these peoples and now declared Lebensraum [élet-
terének] for the Third Reich.
I finish the autopsy of the two little twins. I prepare the protocol, a stand-
ard, minutes-style autopsy report about them. I have done my job well! My
boss, it seems, is pleased. He has a little difficulty reading my block-capital
handwriting. I became accustomed to writing this way in America! I remark to
him that if he wants a nice, neat report I will be in need of a typewriter, be-
cause I write on one even at home. He asks what kind of machine I am used
to. I answer: “Olympia Elit.”55 “All right then! You will get a typewriter! I
will send it to you tomorrow. I want to receive neat work, because these [re-
ports] are going to be sent from here to the institute for racial and develop-
mental biology in Berlin-Dahlem.” From this I learn that the experiments here
are being reviewed by medical authorities of the highest standing in one of the
most illustrious scientific institutions in the world!
The next day an SS soldier brings me a typewriter, an Olympia! And again
I receive twin corpses. Four pairs of twins have been brought over from the
Gypsy camp’s twins group. They are the corpses of Gypsy children under ten
years of age.
52
Printed thus in the original, including quotation marks. The correct German spelling would be
Kriminaldoktor; compare its appearance at the end of Chapter 15.
53
Literally “evil-doing doctor” (gonosztevőorvos). The compound Kriminaldoktor is not in regular
use, and indeed is not correct German, as the word Doktor is used as a title (e.g., “Doktor
Mengele”) but not as a generic word for “physician” (for which Arzt would be correct). However,
it appears that what Nyiszli (if only provisionally and ironically) intends here by the compound is
something like “forensic pathologist” (i.e., a medical professional specializing in criminal investi-
gation – in correct German, Gerichtsmediziner), in an analog of words like Kriminalbeamte (“po-
lice detective”) or Kriminalgericht (“criminal court”). He then deliberately mistranslates this in-
vented compound for his Hungarian readers, taking Kriminal- in its literal or basic sense – a prac-
tice which he continues to follow in his subsequent uses of the word below, whether spelling it
criminaldoctor or Kriminaldoktor.
54
The possessive ending here (fajteóriájuk) is for the third person plural (“their”). Presumably
Nyiszli intends to refer to National Socialists in general and not the Jews themselves.
55
Thus in the original. Nyiszli has presumably “normalized” the English spelling for his Hungarian
readers here.
I perform an autopsy on a pair of twins, recording every phase of the au-

topsy process in the protocol. I remove the skullcap. I extract the brain togeth-
er with the cerebellum. I examine everything. Next comes the opening of the
thoracic cavity, the extraction of the sternum. Then I remove the tongue
through an incision made below the chin. Together with it comes the esopha-
gus. Then follows the trachea with the two lungs. I wash the organs so I can
see them clearly. There’s blood everywhere! The most insignificant-looking
little spot or change of color can furnish important data. I slice open the peri-
cardium, ladle out the exudate fluid [izzadmányfolyadékot]. I take out the heart
as well! I hold it beneath the tap, wash away the blood. I turn it over in the
palm of my hand. In the outer wall of the left ventricle is a tiny, round, pale-
red spot, caused by a pin prick, it barely stands out against the surrounding
color. I can’t be wrong! The pinprick could have been made by a very fine
needle. Naturally a hypodermic needle! The child received an injection, but
for what reason? Someone might receive an injection to the heart in the case
of an emergency due to cardiac insufficiency perhaps. I soon figure it out. I
open the heart, expose the left ventricle. In an autopsy, one would normally
ladle out and weigh the blood in the left ventricle of the heart. That’s not pos-
sible to do here, because the blood has coagulated into a hard, clotted mass.
With tweezers I pull the blood clot apart, sniff it. The characteristic, powerful
smell of chloroform hits my nostrils. The child received a chloroform injec-
tion to the heart! For no other purpose than that the blood in the left ventricle
of the heart should coagulate due to the injected chloroform and, depositing
against the heart valves, provoke immediate cardiac arrest.
My knees shake with excitement. I have discovered the Third Reich’s
darkest medical secret [Felfedeztem a III. Birodalom orvostudomanyának
legsötétebb titkát]. So they kill people here not just with gas, but also with in-
jections of chloroform administered to the heart! Sweat bathes my forehead. It
is fortunate that I am alone. In front of others I would scarcely have been able
to conceal my emotion. I finish the autopsy. I assess the anomalies discovered
and put them down on paper, but the chloroform, the coagulated blood in the
left ventricle and the pinprick in the exterior wall of the heart do not appear in
my report. This was a careful precaution on my part. Dr. Mengele’s dossiers
about these twins are in my hands as well. They contain precise test data, X-
ray images, the finely executed drawings already mentioned, but circumstanc-
es of death and cause of death do not appear under the headings for them. So I
do not fill in this column in the autopsy protocol either. It would not be good
to exceed the permissible limits of knowledge and speak of what I’ve learned
here. Especially not in this place! I am not cowardly by nature. My nerves are
strong. I have clarified [the causes of] innumerable deaths already in my life-
time. People murdered, some out of revenge, some out of jealousy, or killed
for financial gain. I have clarified suicides, and deaths from disease. I have
grown accustomed to the searching out of well-hidden causes of death. I have
come across breathtaking surprises many times, but now a chilling fear runs
all through me. If Dr. Mengele were to suspect that I know the secret of the in-
jections [injekcióinak titkát], ten doctors of the political SS would be on hand
to determine my time of death!
According to orders, after the completion of the autopsy, I must hand over
the bodies to the crematorium men, who must then cremate them immediately.
The scientifically interesting parts I must keep, so that Dr. Mengele will be
able to view them. Things that might interest the anthropological institute in
Berlin-Dahlem I must preserve! They receive appropriate packaging for ship-
ping by mail, and in order that they be transmitted promptly, the package is
stamped with the words “Urgent, important war material.” I sent countless
such packages to Berlin-Dahlem during the course of my activity in the crem-
atorium, and I received replies about them with exhaustive scientific commen-
tary or instructions. I set up a separate dossier to keep the correspondence. In
their letters to Dr. Mengele they always expressed their grateful appreciation
for the rare material sent to them.
I perform autopsies on the other three pairs of twins as well. I assess the
anomalies discovered. The cause of death for these also is a chloroform injec-
tion to the heart. I make a curious observation. In three of the four pairs of
Gypsy twins, the eyes are differently colored! The one eye is blue, the other is
brown. This phenomenon occurs in non-twins as well, but in this case it can
be observed in six out of eight twins. Without question it is an interesting col-
lection of anomalies. In medical science this is called heterochromia, that is,
different-coloredness. I cut out the eyes, place them separately in formalin so-
lution, precisely note down their data so that they will not get mixed up to-
gether. During the autopsies I ran across another interesting finding among the
four pairs of twins. Pulling back the skin on both sides of the neck, I discover
a round, nut-sized abscess above the upper end of the sternum. I press it with
my forceps and a thick secretion of pus comes out. It is very rare, but it is a
symptom known to medical science. It is called a Dubois abscess, a symptom
of hereditary syphilis. It is present in all eight of the twins. I cut out the ab-
scessed parts in sano,56 that is, together with the surrounding healthy tissue.
These too go into a bottle of formalin. In two pairs of twins I also find active
cavernous tuberculosis. I put it all down in the protocols. Again I leave the
column for cause of death blank.
In the afternoon Dr. Mengele comes for a visit. I report to him about the
completed work. I hand over the protocols for the ten twins. He sits down,
reads them through carefully one by one. The phenomenon of heterochromia
in the eyes interests him greatly; the Dubois abscess interests him still more.
He instructs me that I should pack it all up for shipping, enclosing the proto-
56
Nyiszli uses a Hungarian equivalent of the traditional Latin tag: egészségesben (literally, “in
health”).
cols, but that I should fill in the columns for cause of death which have been
left empty. He leaves it to me! I may write in whatever I see fit, so long as
they are all different. Almost apologetically he remarks that these children, as
I myself was able to see, were infected with syphilis as well as tuberculosis;
they would not have been viable anyway, so… He says no more! With that he
has said everything. He has justified the killing of ten children. I make no
comment. I have accepted that in this medical environment tuberculosis is not
treated with pulmonary insufflation, nor syphilis with neosalvarsan, but rather
the patients are killed with a choloroform injection.
My hair almost stands on end when I think of all that I have accepted dur-
ing my brief life here and all that I must still accept, wordlessly, hereafter until
the end arrives for me as well. I knew it when I entered here, but now that I
am in possession of so many secrets, I have no doubt that I am a dead man
walking. Is it conceivable that Dr. Mengele or the Berlin-Dahlem Institute
should allow me to live?
Chapter IX
It is already getting on towards evening. Dr. Mengele has departed, I am alone
with my heavy thoughts. Moving almost mechanically I put the instruments
used in the autopsies back in their places, wash my hands, pass through into
the laboratory and, lighting a cigarette, sit down to relax a little.
A blood-curdling scream splits my brain. Immediately afterwards I hear a
muffled crack, then the heavy fall of a body. I listen intently, tensely awaiting
the minutes to follow. Another horrible scream, another crack, the heavy fall
of another body, not even a minute later. I count seventy dying screams, sev-
enty cracks, as many falls. Heavy footsteps move away, everything grows
still. The scene where the horrible tragedy has played out is a room next to the
dissection hall with a separate entrance from the foyer. It is a bare, half-dark
room with a concrete floor. An iron-barred window looks out on the back
courtyard. I use it as a mortuary chamber. I keep the corpses there until it’s
their turn to be autopsied, and I place them there after autopsy too until they
are cremated. Heaped before the entrance to the room in a pile on the floor lie
dirty, tattered women’s clothing, battered wooden clogs, eyeglasses, stale
pieces of bread, typical personal effects of women in the K.Z. I enter the
room. I was prepared for a rather extraordinary sight after what I had heard,
but a horrifying picture unfolds before my eyes as I look around the half-
darkened room. The bloodied remains of seventy young, naked female bodies
lie before me. The bodies lie every which way, slumped over one another,
covered in one another’s blood. I move closer and with still greater horror I
see that not everyone who is lying here is dead! Some among them are still
alive, they make slow movements with their arms and legs and keep trying to
lift their bloodied heads, eyes opened wide.
I lift one of the still-moving heads, then a second one, then a third, and it is
clear to me that apart from cyclon gas [ciklongáz] and chloroform injection,
there is also a third form of mortality here, the shot to the back of the neck!
The entrance hole reveals that it originates from a 6-millimeter, so-called
small-caliber weapon; there is no exit-wound hole. This suggests a soft lead
bullet. These can flatten out inside the skull so much that they remain inside.
Sadly, I am an expert; within minutes I take everything in and clearly see the
situation in all its horror. I am no longer surprised either that the small-caliber
bullets did not cause immediate death for all the victims, even though the
shots were fired from a distance of 3-4 centimeters, as the burns on the skin
show, straight in the direction of the brain stem. It appears the gun was off by
1-2 millimeters, and thus it did not cause immediate death.
I take that in too, but I do not think about it. I am afraid I will go mad. I go
out into the courtyard. I ask one of the Sonderkommando where the seventy
unfortunates came from. They are the selected [kiszelektáltjai] from camp sec-
tion C, he replies, every evening at seven a truck brings seventy over. They all
get a shot to the back of the neck.
With a heavy head, almost dazed, I walk along the gravel paths of the
green-lawned crematorium courtyard. I watch the Sonderkommando’s evening
roll call. At the moment there is no change of shift for the night. Crematorium
I is not in service today. I look across: the chimneys of Crematoria II, III and
IV are spewing forth flames [lángot szórnak].
It is still too early for dinner. The Sonderkommando men bring out a regu-
lation soccer ball. The teams take the field, “SS versus SK.” The crematori-
um’s SS guards stand on one side, the Sonderkommando on the other. They
kick the ball. The sound of hearty laughter fills the courtyard. The audience,
made up of SS and Sonderkommando men, root for their sides, cheering the
players on like they were at a peaceful small-town sports ground. Astounded, I
take this in too, but I do not wait for the end of the game. I retire to my room. I
eat my dinner and get to sleep with two 0.10 [sic]57 tablets of Luminal. I was
in great need of it in order to do so. I sensed that I was on the verge of nervous
collapse. Luminal-induced sleep is the best antidote!
Chapter X
In the morning I wake up a little dazed. I pass through into the neighboring
room, furnished with a shower bath, and for half an hour I allow the icy water
of the Vistula to wash over me. I feel it doing good for my shattered nerves.
My Luminal daze disappears as well. How orderly these Germans are! Here at
the disposal of the Sonderkommando stands a white-tiled, ten-man shower
57
Nyiszli does not name a unit; presumably he means grams.
bath. Those who work with corpses must wash themselves frequently. Bathing
twice a day is mandatory, everyone does it with pleasure.
I carry with me my elegant doctor’s bag. A Sonderkommando man brought
it for me from the undressing room, from the pile of clothing of some doctor
colleague of mine gone to his death by gas. Inside are a blood-pressure gauge,
a stethoscope, fine-quality syringes, instruments, injections necessary for first
aid. I can make very good use of it in outside practice. Here outside practice
means the four crematoria. I begin my rounds here! I take a turn first through
the SS quarters [SS. szállást], I examine anyone who comes forward. There
are always a few! Here everyone eagerly reports sick for 3-4 days so they may
rest up a little after their demanding service. However, there are more serious
cases as well! The treatment of the sick encounters no difficulties, for in the
matter of medicine supplies we can compete with the best pharmacy in Berlin.
There is a separate Kommando here whose task is to open the hand luggage of
the transports who go to the gas chambers, before it is shipped out together
with the clothes and shoes, and to collect any medicines found there to hand
over to me. I put them in order, grouping them according to their effects. It’s a
big job, for the transports arriving from various countries of Europe bring with
them their own medicines, and these thus are fitted with labels in the respec-
tive countries’ languages. I have a lot of trouble with the ones in Greek,
Polish, Czech and Dutch. As a curiosity, I note that the large majority of the
drugs found with the transports belong in some way to the class of sedatives.
This typifies the nervous condition of Europe’s persecuted Jewry.
After I finish my patient rounds in the SS quarters, I go up to the Sonder-
kommando quarters. Here I have to look after a few burns. They are a com-
mon occurrence among the stokers. Organic diseases proper do not turn up
much among the men of the Sonderkommando. Their beds and clothing are
clean, their food is good, one could even say excellent. Besides, they are all
carefully selected young men of robust physique. More common are psycho-
logical cases. The horrifying consciousness that their own brothers and sisters,
their wives, their children, their aged parents and their entire people are per-
ishing here, that every day they drag thousands of dead bodies in front of the
cremation furnaces and thrust them into the cremation muffles [hamvasztósze-
krényekbe], provokes serious psychological depression and melancholy. Eve-
ryone here has a past which he thinks on with pain and a future which he
thinks on with terror. The future of a Sonderkommando is a period which can
be expressed in very brief units. According to the experience of four years, a
Sonderkommando lives for four months. Once these have passed, a large de-
tachment of the political SS appears one day and herds the men of the
Sonderkommando into the rear courtyard of the crematorium. A burst of gun-
fire, and half an hour later the newly established Sonderkommando arrives.
They strip the clothes from their dead colleagues, and within another hour all
that remains of the latter is a pile of ashes. Their first job is the cremation of
their predecessors.
On every occasion when I do patient rounds in their quarters, there are al-
ways a few who call me aside and ask me for a rapid, surely lethal poison. I
refuse them all. Today, however, I regret having done so. They all died, rapid-
ly and surely, just as they wanted to die, but not by their own hands, as would
have been better, but rather at the hands of their executioners!
Chapter XI
The next stop on my patient rounds is Crematorium number II. A meadow
path and the dead-end tracks of the “Jews’ ramp” [zsidórámpa] separate it
from Crematorium Number I. The building is constructed following exactly
the same plan as number I. The undressing room, the gas chamber, the crema-
tion hall, the SS quarters and the Sonderkommando quarters all match number
I; only the room corresponding to the dissection hall is occupied here by a
gold refinery [aranyöntöde]. Everything collected in the four crematoria
winds up here, gold teeth, jewelry, gold coins, precious stones, platinum ob-
jects, cigarette cases, as well as every object made of a precious metal which
is gathered from the clothing and luggage or off the bodies of the transports.
Three goldsmiths work here. They first sterilize, then classify the jewelry.
They remove the precious stones. Thus prepared it goes into the smelter. The
weight in pure gold of the gold teeth and jewelry “extracted” from the four
crematoria and smelted here each day is 30-35 kilograms [30-35 kiló].
Casting takes place in a disk-shaped graphite form about five centimeters
in diameter. The weight of one gold disk is 140 grams. I know exactly. I
weighed it myself on the dissection-hall scale.
The dentists who remove the teeth from the corpses lying before the fur-
naces do not throw every gold bridge or tooth into the bucket filled with hy-
drochloric acid, but rather a part thereof, sometimes more, sometimes less, ac-
cordingly as the SS guards draw near to or move away from the work site,
winds up in their pockets. The same thing is done with jewelry, precious
stones sewn into clothing and gold coins by the Kommando that works in the
undressing room as they glean valuables from the hand baggage and clothing
left behind. This is a very risky, indeed life-risking operation, for the SS
guards are present everywhere and they keep strict watch over the valuables
that have come into the Third Reich’s possession, especially over precious
stones and gold.
At first I did not have a firm opinion on the moral and legal propriety of
the Sonderkommando’s gold acquisitions, but after a few days, once I became
better acquainted with the situation, I acknowledged the Sonderkommando as
the rightful owners and heirs of any gold that arrives here.
The men of the Sonderkommando brought the gold they acquired to the
smelter too. Even the most stringent surveillance still left a way for them to
get it in and then back out into their hands again as 140-gram disks. More dif-
ficult was the operation of actually using the gold, that is, its fair exchange for
value. No one ever entertained the idea that one might save gold here, for eve-
ry one of them was a dead man walking with a four-month term! Yet four
months is horribly long in this situation! To be sentenced to death and to carry
out such work is a situation that wears down body and soul and drives many to
madness! One must make life easier, more bearable for this brief period! Even
here that can be had with gold.
Thus arose among the first Sonderkommando, and thus remains even today
among the twelfth, a new instrument of exchange, the 140-gram gold disk. In
the smelter there is no smaller graphite crucible, so there is no smaller gold
disk either. What the price of the purchased items would be in the outside
world is of no significance here, for he who gives the gold has already forfeit-
ed his life when he entered here, and he who gives something in return for the
gold puts his life in play twice: the first time when, passing through the four-
fold SS guard chain [a négysoros SS. őrláncon] which surrounds the K.Z., he
brings in items hard to get even outside and only obtainable with a [ration]
ticket, the second time when he carries the gold out through the guard chain.
As upon entering, so upon leaving, there are searches.
The gold thus travels up to the crematorium gates in the pockets of one of
the Sonderkommando men. There it stops! The Kommando man goes to the SS
man who is standing guard, exchanges a few words with him. The latter turns
and moves away from the gate. A group made up of 20-25 Polish track work-
ers with a foreman is working on the railway line that runs in front of the
crematorium. At a nod of the head, the foreman quickly brings over a folded
bag, takes away the piece of gold, wrapped in paper. The bag is inside the
gate. The railway man has a new order for the next day.
The Sonderkommando man goes to the guardhouse beside the gate. He
takes a hundred cigarettes and a bottle of schnapps from the bag. The SS man
enters the hut. He quickly pockets the bottle and the cigarettes and is content,
for the SS get only two cigarettes per day, and no schnapps at all. However,
cigarettes and schnapps are a much needed stimulant and narcotic drug here.
The SS smoke and drink. So do the Sonderkommando as well. By this route
all sorts of necessary goods flow in, principally butter, ham, onions and eggs.
The transports do not bring such things. Gold procurement happens on a col-
lective basis, so distribution of the smuggled goods happens collectively as
well. The crematorium commander as well as the other non-commissioned of-
ficers all get their share of cigarettes, schnapps and food in abundance. Every-
one acts as if they know nothing of anything, indeed they do not want to, for
there’s advantage in it for everyone. The SS guards in the crematorium are
very easy to handle one by one. They are afraid only of one another. The
Sonderkommando will not sell anyone out, of that they are sure. It is for this
reason that the Sonderkommando’s agent hands over the cigarettes, schnapps
and food allotted to the SS to each of them individually, one on one.
By the same route every morning the Völkischer Beobachter,58 the Third
Reich’s official newspaper, arrives at the gate. Again, a railway foreman
brings it. The price of subscription is one piece of gold. Anyone who will
bring a newspaper into the K.Z. for a prisoner for 30 days has earned it.
Ever since I’ve been in the crematorium I have received the paper. I read it
through in a secure hiding place and relate the daily news to the Kommando
clerk. He passes it along to his comrades. Within a few minutes everyone
knows the latest events.
The Sonderkommando are the nobility of the K.Z. They sleep in a heated,
airy, clean room, on clean beds with soft pillows, under warm blankets, they
have excellent provisions and excellent clothes. They have plenty to smoke
and eat. Consequently they do not become brutalized like the people wallow-
ing among the lice in the filthy boxes [bokszaiban]59 of the camp, driven wild
by hunger, who tear at each other with their teeth over a dropped piece of
bread or half a potato.
They are noble in their behavior as well. They give something to everyone
they come near. For days now a 500-member female road-building Komman-
do has been working in front of the gate. Two SS men and 3-4 bloodhounds
guard them. They carry stones for the road. Some men of the Sonderkomman-
do, with the permission of their own guards at the gate, make contact with the
guards of the women’s Kommando, passing a case of cigarettes across to
them. Everything is arranged! Three or four of the women come up to our gate
with pieces of stone in their hands as if they were working there, and receive
the sweaters, shoes and pieces of clothing prepared for them. They also get
cigarettes, bread, smoked lard. Group by group, the women come to the gate,
group by group the Sonderkommando men hand out the gifts. This is a duty of
honor. No one knows any of the women, yet hundreds of pieces of clothing,
stockings, sweaters and cigarettes and soap are there for them to happily take
away, only to repeat the scene the next day. In the crematorium’s gigantic
storeroom [a krematórium óriasi raktárában] there are plenty of clothes,
shoes, stockings! I would place the number of those whom the Sonderkom-
mando helps in the thousands. Nor do I hold back from the action myself. I
stuff my pockets with vitamin tablets, sulfamide powder for wounds, bandag-
es, vials of tincture of iodine, I hasten back to my room three times, four
times, to refill my emptied pockets with these precious, life-saving materials
and deliver them to those who are so much in need of them.
58
59
See Note 29 above.
After Crematorium number II, I carry out my patient-visiting duties in

Crematoria III and IV. In number III, Greeks and Poles work alongside nearly
100 Hungarian deportees in the Sonderkommando. In number IV there are
mostly Poles and Frenchmen.
Everywhere operations are in full swing. The Jews’ ramp pours its death-
marked victims forth from itself in a rushing frenzy, like a swollen river split
into four branches [mint négy ágra szakadt, duzzadt folyó]. Shuddering, I ob-
serve everywhere the harmony, the machine-like efficiency, the order with
which the murders are carried out. As if it were settled in for eternity. If I
should ever become free again, whom could I tell of all the things that I see
here, such that they might believe me? Spoken or written words cannot con-
vey any idea of what is happening here. How futile, then, this effort of mine to
photograph these things in my mind and record them in my memory!
Chapter XII
I have a Petit Larousse60 dictionary as well, in the map section of which I look
up the place names that I read in the newspaper. Sitting in my room I study the
situation on the western, southern and eastern fronts. Heavy steps approach; I
quickly turn the page with the map on it. I look expectantly toward the door.
My visitor is the commander of the crematorium. He tells me that an im-
portant commission is arriving at two o’clock this afternoon; the dissection
hall should be made ready!
A lacquer-black, closed funeral hearse arrives first. It brings the deceased,
the body of an SS captain. I have them place it on the dissecting table just as it
is, in uniform.
The commission arrives at precisely the appointed time, all high-ranking
officers in splendid uniforms. An SS doctor with the rank of colonel, a prose-
cutor, an examining magistrate, two inspectors from the Gestapo and a mili-
tary court clerk make up the commission’s membership. A few minutes later
Dr. Mengele arrives.
I offer seats to the officers. They engage in a brief discussion. The inspec-
tors present the circumstances of the body’s discovery. The gunshot wounds
testify to murder or assassination. The dead officer’s pistol, still hanging in its
holster on his belt, excludes the possibility of suicide.
One might assume murder by a fellow officer, or by a subordinate who had
a grudge for some reason. Still, the possibility of assassination, which is a
common enough partisan activity in majority-Polish Gleiwitz and its sur-
roundings, comes more readily to mind.
60
A French publisher of dictionaries. In French in the original.
The autopsy must determine, did the shot come from in front or behind?
what type and what caliber of weapon was used? from what distance did the
murder or assassination occur?
At the moment there is no forensic pathologist in Gleiwitz. As a result the
corpse has been brought to the crematorium’s dissection hall for the perfor-
mance of the autopsy. The distance between Auschwitz and Gleiwitz is just 40
kilometers. This is the closest [facility].
I took part in the commission’s discussion at a respectful distance as a lis-
tener, and waited with the patience of a K.Z. prisoner for Dr. Mengele’s in-
structions.
That it might be permitted to me, a detainee in the K.Z., a Jewish prisoner,
to contaminate by my touch the corpse of an SS officer, let alone to dissect it,
I did not even dare to dream. After all, in this time of racial laws, even in my
civilian life, I was banned from the medical treatment of Christian, or rather,
Aryan patients.
I am very surprised, therefore, when Dr. Mengele turns to me and orders
me to perform the autopsy. First of all one must undress the corpse, which is
not an easy operation. In particular, pulling off the boots is a two-man job. I
ask permission to call some people to carry this out. The commission keeps up
a lively conversation and only absent-mindedly observes the undressing.
With the first incisions I must overcome a feeling of inferiority and stage
fright. I make a transverse incision across the scalp and with rapid movements
I pull one half over the corpse’s face, the other below the neck. After that fol-
lows the more difficult task of sawing around and removing the top of the
skull. The prescribed incisions proceed one after another in quick succession.
Next in order is the examination of the two gunshot wounds. In every gun-
shot injury two wounds are produced if the projectile passes through the body:
the entrance wound and the exit wound. In the majority of cases they are easi-
ly distinguishable by specialists since the entrance wound is smaller than the
exit wound. In the present case two exactly uniformly sized wounds are pre-
sent, one below the left nipple and one at the top edge of the scapular region
of the back.
The case is starting to become complicated and thus interesting. What
could the reason be for the uniformity of the entrance and exit wounds? This
is a circumstance in contradiction to practical experience, there must be an ex-
planation for it. Dr. Mengele suddenly raises a possibility. Perhaps it was not
one shot that passed through the body, but rather two shots, one from in front
and one from behind, or vice versa. That might have happened if, after the
first shot, he received the second shot while fallen and lying on the ground.
The bullets never exited, so there are two entering shots, and hence two uni-
form wounds. A very natural conclusion. It must be tested. To that end I ex-
plore the wound canal. The shot, having passed through the myocardium and
grazed the left side of the spinal column, proceeded at a 35-degree angle to the
top surface of the left scapula where, breaking off a small piece, it exited the
body. – The situation is perfectly clear! There was one shot, in all probability
from the front, since the wound canal proceeds at a 35-degree angle upwards
from below, from front to back. The surface wounds are the same because in
its trajectory the bullet grazed the spinal column, broke off a piece from the
scapula and, thus spent, did not tear a larger wound when it exited the body.
No one shoots downwards from above at a 35-degree angle! To fire a shot
like that one would have to raise one’s arm straight up. That’s too complicat-
ed. Nor did a partisan do it. There’d be no point, they can shoot straight. It
thus is clear to me that the shot did not come from behind but rather from in
front, from a revolver pointed upward at close range by an acquaintance or
stranger who stopped him in his path for some reason. That, however, is a
matter for further investigation. It seems that they are satisfied with even that
much, indeed they declare that from now on all autopsy cases will be sent here
for the purpose of evaluation.
They find that a very convenient and sound solution. Following this autop-
sy I thus became K.Z. forensic pathologist charged with performing forensic
medical duties for the Gleiwitz district. Such a position could exist nowhere
else in the world!
Chapter XIII
Early one morning orders come to me by telephone that I should immediately
proceed to the pyre and bring the medicines and eyeglasses gathered there to
Crematorium I; from there, after sorting, they will be shipped out.
The pyre [máglya] lies behind the little birch forest of Birkenau [a birke-
naui kis nyírfaerdő], at a distance of five to six hundred meters from Cremato-
rium IV [a krema IV-től öt-hatszáz méter távolságra] in a clearing surrounded
by a stand of firs [egy fenyőerdővel körülvett tisztáson]. It lies outside the
K.Z.’s electrical fences, between the first and second guard chain. My free-
dom of movement does not extend out there. I ask for written permission at
the office [irodában]. I obtain a Passierschein61 valid for three people. I’m
taking with me, namely, two men who will assist me in bringing the packages
here. We start off in the direction of the thickly billowing, dense, black col-
umn of smoke. Everyone whom misfortune has brought to this place sees this
column of smoke. It is visible from every part of the camp. The terrified gaze
of all who descend from the wagons and line up for selection immediately
falls upon it. It was visible every hour of the day and night. During the day it
covered the sky above the Birkenau woods like a dense cloud; at night it lit up
the surroundings as if it were the flames of hell.
61
“Exit pass.” In German in the original.
On our way we pass alongside the crematorium. We reach open road; as

soon as I show my pass to the SS guard on duty at the wire we pass through
without difficulty. A bright, green, grassy clearing, it seems like a peaceful
landscape, but my searching eye soon picks out the men of the second guard
chain, stretching along about a hundred meters away from us, as they stand or
sit in the tall grass next to their machine guns, accompanied by their enormous
bloodhounds.
Crossing the clearing, we come to the entrance of the little stand of firs [kis
fenyőerdő] that bounds it. Again we arrive before a barbed-wire fence and a
barbed-wire-covered wooden gate. On the gate is a large warning sign with
the same text as the signs hanging at the gates to the crematoria: “Entrance to
this area is strictly prohibited to outsiders, even to outside SS personnel.”62
We, men of the Sonderkommando, just walk on in. We do not even have to
show our pass. The crematorium SS perform the guard duties here, and doing
the work are sixty men from Crematorium II, Sonderkommando men assigned
to this place. This is the day duty group. They work from seven in the morning
until seven in the evening, when they are replaced by the sixty men of the
night shift, who are provided by Crematorium IV.
Passing through the gate we come to a courtyard-like area, in the midst of
which stands a long, shabbily plastered, thatch-roofed house. Its little win-
dows are covered over with wooden boards. It is built in the familiar form of a
rural German peasant house. It is at least one hundred and fifty years old. That
much is shown by the ancient, black, thatched roof as well as the many layers
of plaster peeling from the walls. The German state appropriated the village of
Birkenau near Auschwitz for the construction of the K.Z. They tore down all
its houses with the exception of this one, and relocated the population else-
where.
What was the actual purpose of this house before? As a dwelling? One
with rooms separated from one another by walls, which had been converted
into a single long room [egyetlen hosszú helyiséggé] for its new purpose by
the removal of the partitions? Or was it indeed built originally as one large
room, as a warehouse, or for another similar purpose? I do not know! Now it
is an undressing room [vetkezőhelyiség]: those bound for death on the pyre
take their clothes off here.
Those transports which will not fit into the four crematoria are directed
here from the Jews’ ramp. Theirs is the most terrible of ends. Here there are
no water taps with which they might at least quench their burning thirst. There
are no deceptive signs to dispel their forebodings. There is no gas chamber
[nincs gázkamara] which they believe to be a shower room. Here there is only
a thatch-roofed farmhouse, once painted yellow [sárgára], with shuttered
62
In Hungarian in original: “Ezen terülétre a belépés idegennek, sőt idegen SS személyeknek is
szigorúan tiltva van.”
windows, and behind it in turn, an enormous column of smoke rising to the

sky, diffusing the scorched smell of burning human flesh and hair.
A crowd of around 5,000 souls is standing in numb terror in the courtyard.
Surrounding them stands a thick chain of SS with enormous bloodhounds on
leashes. They go into the undressing room three to four hundred at a time.
There, driven along in a hail of truncheon blows, they quickly lay aside their
clothes and exit by the door on the other side of the house, making room for
those following after them.
Stepping out the door, they do not even have time to look around them and
realize the horror of their situation, for right away the Sonderkommando seize
them by each arm [karon is ragadja őket egy-egy Sonderkommandós] and take
them between a gauntlet of SS guards along a tree-lined, winding path about
150 meters in length to the pyre [egy fáktól szegélyezett, kanyargós, körülbelül
150 méter hosszú úton a máglyához], which they only catch sight of at the
very end of their journey, as they emerge from the wooded path.
The pyre is a ditch 50 meters long, 6 meters wide and 3 meters deep, filled
with hundreds of burning corpses. Along the edge of the pyre facing the
wooded path, at a distance of 5-6 meters from each other, SS soldiers stand
with weapons in their hands, 6-millimeter small-caliber weapons used for the
shot to the back of the neck. As they emerge from the wooded path, two
Sonderkommando men working at the pyre grab the unfortunate victims by the
arm on either side and carry them before one of the SS shooters’ weapons, 15-
20 meters away. Amid the horrid screaming, here too the shot sounds out with
a muffled crack. The shot sounds out, and the victim, generally only half dead,
is thrown into the sea of fire in the ditch. Fifty meters from this ditch there is
another identical ditch in full operation.
Here at the pyres the commander is Oberscharführer Moll. As a doctor and
eye-witness [mint orvos és mint szemtanú], I affirm that he is the Third
Reich’s cruelest, coldest, most fanatical murderer. Even Dr. Mengele occa-
sionally displayed a human side. When, during selection on the ramp, he ob-
served that some vigorous young woman wanted at all costs to go with her
mother to the left, he would yell at her roughly and order her back to the right.
Even Oberscharführer Mussfeld, the chief shooter of Crematorium I, would
shoot one more round into those victims who did not die immediately from the
shot to the back of the neck. Oberscharführer Moll wastes no time on such
things. For the most part people wind up in the fire alive, and a thousand times
woe to the Sonderkommando man by whose fault the human conveyor belt
flowing from the undressing room to the pyre should get stuck somewhere and
some of the shooters standing at the edge of the pyre [a máglya szélén álló]
thus be forced to wait a few minutes for their next victim.
Moll is everywhere, moving tirelessly around the pyres and along the path
from the pyres to the undressing room. The majority of those led from the un-
dressing room to the pyres allow themselves to be moved along without re-
sistance. They are so paralyzed by numbness and fear that perhaps they do not
even know what is happening to them. Such, in large part, are the elderly and
children. However, there are young people who wind up here too. They try to
resist with all the desperate strength of their instinct for self-preservation. If
Moll notices such a scene along the line of the human conveyor belt he draws
his gun from his always-open holster. A loud shot, often at a distance of 40-50
meters away, and the troublemaker drops, dead, from the Sonderkommando’s
hands. Moll counts as a master shot. He has shot through the arm of many a
Sonderkommando man if he has been dissatisfied with his work, but always
only the arm, all without any shout or prior warning.
The daily capacity of the two pyres is 5,000-6,000 dead [a két máglya napi
teljesítménye 5-6 ezer halott], a little more than a crematorium’s, but the death
of those who wind up here is a hundred thousand times [százezerszer] worse.
They die a double death here, death by a shot to the back of the neck and
death by fire.
After death by gas, by chloroform injection and by a shot to the back of the
neck, this is the fourth type of death which I have encountered, the combined
death [a kombinált halál].
I gather up the medicines and eyeglasses left behind. With my brain in a
fog, with legs trembling with emotion, I start for “home,” Crematorium I,
which to use Dr. Mengele’s words, “is no sanatorium, but a man gets on quite
tolerably there.” After the pyre, he’s absolutely right!
Arriving home, I head for my room. I do not group the medicines today, I
do not organize the eyeglasses. I take some Luminal and go to bed. Today’s
dose of Luminal is 30 centigrams. Perhaps it will be effective against pyre
disease.
Chapter XIV
The next day I awaken to be witness to another incident. Every day here has
its incident, some horror never imagined by me before. I hear from one of the
Sonderkommando men – they know everything – that there is a complete bar-
racks lockdown [teljes barakkzárlat] in the K.Z., which means that not a soul
can leave the barracks. The SS soldiers and their police dogs make sure of
this, for today they are liquidating the Czech section of the camp.
The Czech camp was formed from fifteen thousand people brought here
from the Theresienstadt ghetto. It had the character of a family camp, like the
Gypsy camp. They did not undergo selection upon their arrival. Old, young,
children, all in their own clothes, they were able to live a difficult but still tol-
erable life together. They performed no work.
Thus they had lived for two years [két évig], until the moment of destruc-
tion arrived for them too. K.Z. Auschwitz is an extermination camp! It is only
a question of time when the final hour will strike for its inhabitants.
One after another, the Hungarian Jewish transports arrive at the ramp. It of-
ten happens that two trains will arrive together and pour forth from their in-
sides thousands of people.
What Dr. Mengele does at the ramp cannot even be called selection any-
more. His arm moves in only one direction. To the left! Entire trains [egész
vonatok] thus go, without remainder, into the gas chambers or onto the pyres.
The quarantine camp, Camp C, Camp D, the Fkl63 sector, all are crammed
with people despite the daily transports of thousands [többezres] heading out
to other, more distant camps.
The elderly of the Czech camp, its youth, weakened by the sufferings of
two years passed in the K.Z., even its children, wasted away to skin and
bones, now had to give up their places to new arrivals capable of work.
There had already been a worsening in their situation in the preceding
weeks. Their food rations had to be reduced after the arrival of the first Hun-
garian transports, and a few weeks later, when huge crowds now filled the
camp and their provisioning confronted the camp commanders with an almost
impossible task, provisioning of the Czech camp ceased almost entirely.
They were truly mad with hunger! Their systems, already so weakened
otherwise, fell apart completely in days. Diarrhea, dysentery and petechial ty-
phus decimated them! Every day they had 50-60 dead. This intelligent people
lived through indescribable suffering in the last few days until the hour of lib-
eration arrived for them, the hour of annihilation!
The barracks lockdown was declared already from early morning across
the whole area of the camp. Several companies of SS soldiers surrounded the
Czech camp and forced the people to form ranks. As they were loaded onto
trucks, the screaming of those awaiting transport was terrible to hear. They
knew what was awaiting them; they had lived for two years in the K.Z. The
number of inhabitants in the Czech camp on the day of the liquidation was
twelve thousand. Fifteen hundred men and women still capable of work and
eight doctors were selected out from among them; the rest ended up in Crema-
toria II and III. The next day, the Czech camp, inhabited for two years, was
deserted. In Crematoria II and III also everything was still. I saw a truck load-
ed with ashes pull out from the crematorium and make its way in the direction
of the Vistula River.
The camp’s numbers had been reduced by ten thousand heads, and the K.Z.
archives had been increased by one piece of paper. On the piece of paper
stood a brief report: “The section of Concentration Camp Auschwitz inhabited
by Czechs, the so-called Czech camp, has been liquidated due to a high inci-
63
Abbreviation in the original. It stands for Frauenkonzentrationslager, or “women’s concentration
camp.”
dence of cases of petechial typhus!” Signed: Dr. Mengele, Hauptsturmführer,

I. Lagerarzt.64
The eight doctors from the Czech camp, whom Dr. Mengele allowed to
live at the intercession of Professor Dr. Epstein, some completely shattered in
health and nerves from the physically and mentally grinding work of the last
weeks, in which they displayed for their patients a care which knew neither
fear of danger nor fatigue, some infected with petechial typhus themselves,
wound up in the Camp “F” hospital barracks as patients. The day after the liq-
uidation I went on official business into Camp “F,” where I chatted with them,
and so with the renowned Prague physician Dr. Heller, former chief physician
of the Czech camp, as well. From him I heard recounted the sufferings and ru-
in of the finest flower of Czech Jewry. Since that day, the eight doctors have
died as well. They were true doctors! With profound respect I pay tribute to
their memory!
Chapter XV
Located next to the Czech camp is Camp C, the camp for Hungarian women;
the number of its inhabitants often reaches 60,000, despite the transports trans-
ferred each day to more-distant camps. In this overcrowded camp it happened
one day that the doctors found symptoms of scarlet fever among a few of the
inhabitants of one of the barracks. On Dr. Mengele’s orders, this barracks as
well as the ones lying to its left and right were placed under lockdown. The
barracks lockdown lasted from morning to evening, when trucks arrived and
took the inhabitants of all three barracks to the crematorium. Such were the ef-
fective measures ordered by Dr. Mengele for containing the spread of epidem-
ic disease.
The Czech camp and the three barracks of Camp C thus fell victim to Dr.
Mengele’s actions to contain the epidemic. Fortunately, the barracks doctors
caught on in good time, and if an infectious disease raised its head anywhere,
they were careful not to bring it to the attention of the SS medical authorities.
If possible, they hid such patients in some out-of-the-way box29 in the bar-
racks and cared for them according to the meager means available, but they
did not refer them to the hospital because there the SS doctors check the pa-
tients every day, and the emergence of an infectious disease could bring on the
complete liquidation of the patient’s respective barracks, as well as 2-3 of the
neighboring barracks. In the medical jargon of the SS, this method is known
as broad-based epidemic containment. The result of an action is 1-2 truckloads
of ashes. During my time as a public-health official at home, I too used this
64
Signature in German in original. Hauptsturmführer is an SS rank equivalent to captain; I. here is a
Roman numeral, the period indicating that the number is used as an ordinal (“first”); Lagerarzt
means “camp physician.”
expression. The practice of broad-based epidemic containment was imple-

mented such that, for example in a case of typhus or diphtheria, the patient
discovered to be infectious would be isolated and the area surrounding the pa-
tient’s home, often the inhabitants of one or two streets, would be provided
with preventive vaccinations. Other countries, other customs!
After these preliminaries, one morning a couple of female corpses are
brought over from the hospital in Camp B II, sent by Dr. Mengele to be autop-
sied. As usual, I simultaneously receive descriptions of the deceased women’s
disease progress as well as their treatment charts. I read them over carefully.
Entered under the heading for diagnosis is abdominal typhus [hastífusz],65 un-
der the heading for cause of death, heart failure, in both cases accompanied by
a question mark.
I am not the overly deliberate type, someone who first weighs everything
up and then acts. I decide quickly and I act quickly, especially in important
matters. It does not always turn out well! I have my quick thinking to thank
for my existence here after all.
Now too I decide quickly. It would never do for Dr. Mengele to obtain a
diagnosis of typhus from me as a result of the autopsy of the two corpses! The
description of the two deceased women’s illness is full of holes, the diagnosis
is marked as a question. Dr. Mengele is not sure of himself in this matter! The
autopsy findings will be decisive for him. That is why he sent the two corpses
for dissection.
I perform the autopsy; the small intestines of both corpses display the ul-
cerous condition of third-week abdominal typhus. The spleens are swollen in
both of them as well. In both cases it’s clearly typhus.
At the usual hour, around five in the afternoon, Dr. Mengele arrives, and
with his cheerful face which hides so much cruelty, comes to me and asks me
eagerly about the results of the autopsy. The two corpses are lying on the ta-
ble, open. The small and large intestines as well as the spleens from both
corpses, washed and opened, are in separate vessels, ready for examination.
I announce the diagnosis: inflammation of the small intestine, with diffuse
ulceration of the intestines. I give a talk to Dr. Mengele about the ulcerous
condition of third-week-stage typhus, comparing it with the formation of ul-
cers which likewise occurs in inflammation of the small intestine. I point out
to him that swelling of the spleen is also frequent in inflammation of the intes-
tines, so this is not typhus, but rather a severe inflammation of the small intes-
tine, probably arising from botulism.
Dr. Mengele is a race biologist, not a pathologist. It was not difficult to get
him to accept my diagnosis. The confusion, however, irritated him, and turn-
65
An older name for typhoid fever, a waterborne disease distinct from typhus, which is spread by
lice. Nyiszli uses hastífusz and tífusz (“typhus”) indistinguishably in discussing the disease in the
paragraphs that follow.
ing to me he expressed his opinion that those women doctors who commit
such serious errors in the diagnosis of illnesses would be of far greater use to
the K.Z. carrying rocks than in the hospital where, as a result of incorrect di-
agnoses, patients who might have been saved end up dying.
He takes the autopsy protocol with him, but before he places it in his brief-
case he writes a note on the margin of the file. I am standing behind his back;
I read over his shoulder: Rücksprache m. Aerztinnen,66 which freely translated
means, calling to account of the women doctors. I regret very much that I
quite innocently have put my female colleagues in a difficult situation, for in-
deed they produced a magnificent diagnosis. Now they could lose their posts
and wind up in a road construction Kommando doing hard physical labor. I
will be the cause of it all should Dr. Mengele carry out his threat.
I’m too self-critical! I admit, I have violated the medical ethics in force be-
yond the electrified barbed wire. I have placed two or three people in a diffi-
cult situation. However, on what sort of “broad base” might Dr. Mengele have
carried out his usual methods of typhus-epidemic containment had I not done
so?
The next day I receive reassuring news regarding the women doctors. Doc-
tor Mengele chewed them out; nothing else happened. They continued to do
their jobs. Plenty of corpses still came to me with plenty of patient records,
but after that not one had the box for diagnosis filled in. I wanted it that way
myself; it was for the best.
Dr. Mengele’s indignation over the fact that it was not possible to save the
lives of two unfortunate women on account of a mistaken diagnosis troubled
me for days afterward. Such cynicism coupled with such evil, in a man who is
a doctor! More than a doctor, an evil-doing doctor, a Kriminaldoktor!67
Chapter XVI
One morning I receive a message from Dr. Mengele that I am to join him im-
mediately at the Camp “F” commandant’s office. I obey the order with pleas-
ure. For a few hours I can free myself from the oppressive atmosphere of the
crematorium. A little walking would not hurt. After the stench of the dissec-
tion hall and the crematorium, the fresh air will do me good. It fills me with
pleasure as well that I will be able to reacquaint myself with my Camp “F”
colleagues, who were so kind to me when I was their guest during the first
days of my K.Z. career. I prepare for the trip, an act which consists of stuffing
my pockets with valuable medicines and grabbing a few packages of ciga-
rettes. I do not want to visit my former lodgings, Hospital Barracks 12, with
empty pockets. That would not do for a Sonderkommando man.
66
In German in the original. Literally translated, “consultation with [the] women doctors.”
67
In German in the original. See Note 53 above.
I pass through the crematorium’s iron gate; the guard standing there rec-
ords my number, I set off in the direction of Camp “F.” I do not hurry; I want
to enjoy this short outing. As I pass along the wire of the “FKL” women’s
camp, I see thousands upon thousands of women coming and going among the
camp’s barracks. They are all alike and repulsive with their shaved heads and
tattered clothing. I think of my wife and my 15-year-old daughter, the rich
curls of their wavy hair and their clothes, carefully planned in long family dis-
cussions. It is already three months [három hónapja] since we parted from
each other on the ramp! What has happened to them since then? Did they stay
together? Are they still here in some part of the K.Z. Auschwitz women’s
camp, or have they gone on to some more-distant camp of the Third Reich?
Three months is a long time! In the K.Z. it is an immensely long time, and yet
I somehow feel they are here, but where? Which is the wire fence, among so
many, that keeps them imprisoned? A difficult question. Wherever my eyes
look, it is nothing but barbed wire to the horizon here, plus concrete posts and
warning signs. The whole K.Z. is nothing but barbed wire, the whole of Ger-
many is nothing but a barbed-wire fence, a giant K.Z.
I arrive before the gate of Camp “F.” A Blockführerstube,68 that is, a camp
guard office, controls entrance at the gate. A rough-faced SS NCO and a pri-
vate are on duty here. I walk up to the guardroom’s little window, roll up the
sleeve of my jacket, and in regulation form announce my number – ”A-8450”
– the number on my tattoo. As I roll up my sleeve one can see I have a wrist-
watch, the wearing of which counted as one of the most serious of crimes in
the K.Z.; however, I have permission from Dr. Mengele, I need it for my
work. Like an angry tiger, the SS NCO comes springing out of the guardroom
and in a hoarse roar demands to know at once what am I looking for in Camp
“F” and how dare I wear a wristwatch? Three months in the crematorium is a
real education! I stand unflinching and, looking him right in the eye, I re-
spond: “I am not looking for anything here, I’m coming to the camp on the
orders of Dr. Mengele. He wants to speak to me, but if it’s not possible to en-
ter then I will return to the crematorium and telephone him.”
Dr. Mengele’s name is a magical name! Everyone is afraid of him. My SS
man becomes tame again in an instant, and he asks politely, how long would I
like to stay in the camp? He has to write it down, you see. I look at my watch
– no comment from him now – it shows 10 o’clock. “I will stay until 2 p.m.,
until I finish the job for Dr. Mengele,” I say, and taking from my pocket a
package of twenty cigarettes I give him a few out of it so he’ll have something
to smoke till I get back! He accepts them happily. Now we salute one another
quite amicably, he all but tells me that he’d be glad to see me again.
68
In German in the original. Literally, the room (Stube) of the Blockführer, the non-commissioned
SS officer in charge of a single barracks (Block) of prisoners.
At any rate, Dr. Mengele’s name, the crematorium and the cigarettes have
worked their effect on the SS slave. Now I can spend a couple of hours in the
company of my colleagues undisturbed. First, however, I must get done with
Dr. Mengele.
I enter the commandant’s barracks; I wait in the anteroom until the man on
duty asks me what errand brings me there? He indicates a door, I pass through
it into a well-furnished study. The walls are covered with charts which show
the population make-up of the K.Z. at various periodic intervals. On one wall
is a photograph of a bespectacled Himmler, a large rotogravure print in an or-
nate frame. Three men are sitting in the room, Dr. Mengele, Hauptsturmführer
Dr. Thilo, chief surgeon, and Obersturmführer Dr. Wolff,69 chief of internal
medicine. Dr. Mengele explains to Dr. Wolff, who has not met me before, that
I am the crematorium’s forensic pathologist. Wolff begins to talk to me. He
tells me that he is very interested in anatomical pathology and would have
gone to the crematorium before now to watch an interesting autopsy here or
there, but he has not had the time for it. Now, however, he is working on a
most significant scientific study; indeed he has summoned me precisely so he
can discuss it with me. In the camp, he explains, chronic diarrhea is terribly
common and has a 90% fatality rate. Clinically speaking he is thoroughly
versed in the course of the disease; he has performed many thousands of ex-
aminations to date. He keeps extremely precise records of them. His work,
however, is not yet perfected, for along with clinical examination during the
processing of a large patient cohort, an indispensable condition for it is the
anatomopathological processing of large numbers of individual corpses dead
from diarrhea. Everything is clear to me now. So Dr. Wolff too is a research-
er? Amid the atmosphere of steaming blood and crematorium smoke at K.Z.
Auschwitz, he too wants to profit from the disease symptoms of the many
hundreds of thousands [sokszázezer] of shrunken, 30-kilogram human wrecks
stricken with diarrhea, and through the autopsy of large numbers of corpses he
wants to reveal those internal manifestations of the disease that have to date
remained elusive to medical science.
Dr. Mengele wants to reveal the secret of the propagation of the species
through the processing of the unlimited human material available, namely,
twin material. Dr. Wolff researches the causes of diarrhea. And yet these
causes are known to all. The recipe for producing diarrhea is as follows. Take
a person, a woman or man or an innocent growing child, tear them from their
home, put a hundred of them in a freight wagon, and having plundered them
of everything they own send them on a journey, after six weeks in a ghetto,
with a single bucket of stagnant water to Auschwitz, then cram them with
thousands of others into barracks originally designed as stables for horses,
give them 700 calories per day of moldy bread made from horse chestnuts
69
No doctor of this name is recorded in contemporary documents.
[vadgesztenyelisztből], margarine made from lignite [lignitszénből], and 30

grams worth of watery salami ground from the flesh of mangy horses [rühes
lovak húsából]. The victim washes this down with half a liter of nettle or tur-
nip soup, cooked without fat, flour or salt; thus in 4-5 days the diarrhea is
ready, and in 3-4 weeks the victim is “better,” having died despite all efforts at
medical intervention.
Dr. Wolff expresses the view that, for the anatomopathological part of his
scientific work, autopsy material from at least 150 corpses will be necessary.
Dr. Mengele joins in our conversation as well, reckoning that I get through 7
autopsies per day so I should be able to prepare the 150 corpses in three
weeks. I do not share their view on this, and I declare in the most explicit
terms that, if they want serious, accurate work, which I do not doubt, then un-
der no circumstances would I undertake the processing of more than three
corpses. On this we agree.
I am dismissed with a brief nod of the head. I seek out my colleagues in
hospital Barracks 12. They receive my medicines with thanks, they smoke my
cigarettes, but in their faces and in their words I sense the symptoms of de-
pression and fatigue. They are still under the effect of the Czech camp’s sad
end. Little by little the hopelessness of their fate is beginning to overcome
them, even as happened to me, though with this difference, that it became ap-
parent to me not little by little but rather in an instant, when I stepped through
the crematorium gate.
I encourage them; I urge them to persevere. I describe to them the military
situation, which is developing ever more favorably for us. I read the newspa-
per every day. I have the means to inform them exhaustively.
We say goodbye with a warm handshake. In the K.Z. parting and saying
goodbye always signifies a little act of dying.
In any case I owe my vanity this much that I note that I am a strong per-
sonality indeed if, in my current situation, I am able to encourage others.
Chapter XVII
One after another, the corpses of Obersturmführer Dr. Wolff’s dead diarrhea
patients go under the scalpel. I have reached the thirtieth autopsy already; I
summarize the results of my work so far. In every case, the mucous membrane
of the stomach displays an inflammatory process, the consequence of which is
the burning out, or rather complete atrophy, of the glands which excrete diges-
tive juices, and stomach acid in particular. In the absence of digestive juice
there is no digestion, but worse, there is fermentation! As the result of my
second observation I note the inflamed condition of the mucous membranes of
the small intestine, together with a complete thinning out of the intestinal wall.
My third observation concerns the most important digestive juice in the small
intestine, bile, an indispensable factor in the digestion of fats. Upon opening
the gall bladder, in place of yellow-green bile I find a colorless, slimy liquid;
it scarcely tints the stool; it is incapable of fulfilling its digestive function. My
fourth observation is the inflammation of the mucous membranes of the large
intestine and the complete atrophy of the intestinal walls, their thinning and
fragility, like cigarette paper. These are no longer digestive channels, but ra-
ther sewage channels: if something is poured in above, it exits below a few
minutes later. These observations constitute, in broad terms comprehensible to
laypersons, my findings. A very monotonous, uninteresting job! That much is
my business! The bacteriological tests are probably carried out by an institute
established in the town of Reisgau70 some two to three kilometers from the
crematorium, which is known officially as the “Institute for Hygiene and Bac-
teriology of the Waffen-SS” and where one of my companions in misfortune,
the celebrated Professor Dr. Mansfeld,71 a teacher at the Bacteriological Insti-
tute at the University of Pecs, is in charge of operations.
Chapter XVIII
I am taking my afternoon break in my room when Oberscharführer Mussfeld
opens the door and enters pushing three unfamiliar men in prison garb before
him. He informs me that I am getting some new colleagues from Dr. Mengele
and, extending an arm toward them, casts a pitying glance on the unfortunate
fellows.
The poor fellows are a pitiable sight as they stand there in their dirty pris-
oners’ clothes, in a silence born of deadly numbness, abashed by the novelty
of the environment. They too immediately realized the hopelessness of their
situation as they passed through the gate to the building.
I extend a friendly hand to them; we introduce ourselves. The first whose
hand I shake is Dr. Görög Dénes, a private university lecturer and pathologist
at the State Public Hospital of Szombathely. He is a short, thin man of about
forty-five years of age who wears thick glasses. He makes a good impression
on me. I have the feeling that we will be good friends. The second is a short,
stocky individual of about fifty years of age, with a hunched back and a very
ugly face. He is Fischer Adolf,72 autopsy assistant for twenty years at the Pra-
gue Institute of Anatomy. As a Czech Jew, he has been an inmate of the K.Z.
for five years already. The third is Dr. Körner Józef, a physician from Nice,
inmate of the K.Z. for four years already. A taciturn but qualified young man,
he is only thirty-two years old.
In order to facilitate the rapid completion of the expanded work, Dr.
Mengele has fished them out of the filthy barracks of Camp “D” and sent
70
In German in the original; no such town exists. Nyiszli has mistaken Polish “Rajsko” (“Raisko”),
the name of a village some three kilometers southwest of Auschwitz, for a German name.
71
Gezar Mansfeld, doctor at the Häftlingskrankenbau (inmate infirmary) of Camp Section BIIf.
72
Nyiszli gives the three men’s names Hungarian-style, last name first.
them to me as assistants for the performance of the ever-growing number of

autopsies. I will remain the leader responsible for research work going for-
ward, only the preparation of correspondence, archives and autopsy protocols
will be my primary task from now on. The two doctors will help with the au-
topsies, and the autopsy assistant, in keeping with his calling, will prepare the
corpses. He will saw off the skullcap, remove the individual organs and pre-
pare them for examination. After the autopsy he will clear away the corpse.
He will keep the dissection hall and the laboratory in order. It seems I have
gotten some considerable assistants for my work, which means a big relief for
me. There’s just one problem! At Dr. Mengele’s express order, I also have to
share my room with the three of them!
The change brings with it numerous disadvantages of every kind. With
four people, the previously spacious room becomes crowded. It means the sur-
render of most of my comforts, but undeniably there are advantages to the
new situation as well. After all, we are sharing, social beings, in this case,
sharing in misfortune.
Chapter XIX
I have finished my morning rounds visiting patients. In all four of the crema-
toria operations are in full swing. Last night they burned the Greek Jewry of
the Mediterranean island of Corfu, one of the oldest faith communities in Eu-
rope. For twenty-seven days [huszonhét napi] they were hauled along, first on
barges, then in closed freight cars, without food or water. When they arrived
at the ramp of Auschwitz extermination camp and the wagons were opened so
that they could disembark and line up for selection, no one got out! Half of
them were dead and the other half were in a state of unconsciousness, dying.
The entire transport, right to the last man, went to Crematorium II. All night
long the plant worked at full capacity. In the morning nothing remained of
them but a great pile of dirty, ragged clothes in the crematorium courtyard. It
was a heart-rending sight as it soaked in the drizzling rain. My glance wanders
over the crematorium chimney: the lightning rods placed at the square chim-
ney’s four corners, all heavy iron rods, have melted from the terrible fire and
are now bent downwards.
During my rounds at Crematorium IV today I had serious work to do. One
of the Sonderkommando stokers had taken a large quantity of Luminal with
the intention of committing suicide. This is the most common form of suicide
here. The Sonderkommando men come by Luminal easily. Plenty of it is col-
lected every day from the baggage left behind by the victims. I approach the
patient’s bed and to my dismay I recognize in it the “Captain.” That is the on-
ly way he is known to everyone in the Kommando, no one knew his name. At
home, in Athens, as a captain in active service he was tutor to the King of
Greece’s children. An endlessly polite, intelligent man, he has been a resident
of the K.Z. for three years. His wife and two children went to the gas upon the
hour of their arrival. He is lying in his bed unconscious, in a deep sleep. He
took the poisonous substance some hours ago, it appears; he has already ab-
sorbed it. I do not take his condition to be life-threatening, not for the moment.
At first the Sonderkommando men standing around the bed ask me quietly to
let the Captain “go on his way,” to not do anything, for with his survival we
would only be prolonging the psychological torments, which he wanted to es-
cape from. The twelfth Sonderkommando’s life term expires in a couple of
weeks anyway! When they see that their arguments have no effect on me and
that I am going to inject some medicines, a few of the older K.Z. residents be-
come quite angry and in a none-too-gentle tone express their contrary views
regarding my life-saving intentions. I let them complain. So long as he does
not catch hypostatic pneumonia, the captain should pull through in four to five
days. For a few more weeks he will shovel coke and stoke the hellish fire
[éleszteni a pokoli tüzet] beneath the dead bodies [holttestei alá] of thousands
of his tortured and overworked brethren sent to die in the gas, and when a cer-
tain day arrives, the last day of the Sonderkommando, he too will join the line.
A hail of fire, and he falls bloodily beside his dead comrades, a mixture of ter-
ror and astonishment in his eyes. Now that I am away from the patient’s bed
and his suffering face does not call on the twenty-years-a-doctor “me” for
help, the human “me” must admit that the captain’s comrades were complete-
ly in the right. I should have let him “go on his way,” not before the cold bar-
rels of steely-blue machine pistols, but rather in a Luminal stupor, free from
psychological torture and pain.
My rounds are completed. I return to Crematorium I. I look in on the dis-
section hall; my new men are dissecting Dr. Wolff’s diarrhea corpses with the
diligent zeal of beginners. They are freshly shaven, their shirts are clean, their
clothes are new, they have fine shoes on their feet, they have been given back
their human form. As they stand around the dissecting table in their white lab
coats, yellow rubber aprons around their necks, rubber gloves on their hands,
the dissection hall and laboratory could create the impression of a serious sci-
entific institute in a specialist unfamiliar with the work carried on here. I am
an expert and I have been working here for three months now! This is not a
scientific institute, but rather a pseudoscientific institute! A pseudoscientific
institute built on false theories! Just as race research is built upon a false theo-
ry, the idea of a superior race is pseudoscientific; so too is Dr. Mengele’s
twin-research work pseudoscientific and based on a false theory. False as well,
and leading to massacre here, is the degenerative theory of dwarves and crip-
ples with which they hope to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race. Not now,
and not to today’s generation of Germans – they still might not believe it – but
after the victorious conclusion of the war! In the airy halls of great museums
there will stand the dwarves and cripples massacred here, the owners, by right
of birth, of the skeletons prepared for this purpose, fitted with supports and
provided with precise labels indicating name and age. Every year on the anni-
versary of the Third Reich’s gloriously concluded racist war for Lebensraum,
the students of the thousand-year Reich’s schools will file into these museums
under the guidance of their teachers. The teachers will explain the significance
of the day, the day of victory. With this victory, called to greatness by the su-
periority of their race, not only have they confined the neighboring French,
Belgian, Russian and Polish peoples within limits appropriate to their inferior-
ity, but they have completely eradicated from Europe a people, the Jewish
people, which, despite counting six thousand years of history, has had no right
to exist for centuries now, because in the course of their thousands of years of
existence they have degenerated into dwarves and cripples. With the admix-
ture of their blood they had profaned and threatened with degeneration the one
pure race, the Aryan race!
With the admixture of their blood they had become harmful to the great
race! They had become dangerous because their brilliant scientists, writers,
businessmen and financiers had amassed such power by then that they were
poised to force Europe beneath their complete domination! For this the first
Führer73 of the Third Reich had inscribed his name in the book of immortals
and gained the gratitude and respect of the entire civilized world, because he
had exterminated this race!
On the basis of such false theories they carry on their war against an entire
world and exterminate, right down to the suckling infants, the Jewish popula-
tion of Europe, brought here for that purpose. Everything in this country is
false! They call the bloodbath of war a crusade. In their eyes, the whole of
Russia is a wild Mongolian steppe! France is the land of a people drowned in
syphilis and in the midst of dying out! The English, from the Prime Minister
on down, all have delirium tremens from too much Scotch whisky! On the
other hand, the Japanese people, the most slant-eyed of Mongol stock, are
honorary Aryans, because their interests for the moment require it. Their
whole life is false! Their daughters and war widows can bear children by any-
one at all, and give them any name at all from among the innumerable names
of those to whom they offer themselves. The multiplication of the race re-
quires it!
Their whole financial system is based on false foundations. Countless
times they have trumpeted to the world that the foundational value of the Na-
tional-Socialist Third Reich is not gold, but work! And yet, in a facility estab-
lished specifically for this purpose, every day they smelt 30-40 kilos of gold
from the teeth of Jews brought here and murdered. But I will not go on, for
then I would have to mention the sign found on the facade of the crematoria’s
underground rooms which falsely declares to the world in seven languages
73
Nyiszli capitalizes Vezér (“leader”) here, presumably intending it as an equivalent for the German
title Führer.
that it is a bath here when in fact it is a gas chamber! On the canisters contain-
ing the cyclon gas it says that it is a poison for exterminating bedbugs and lice
when in fact it kills humans within a few seconds [néhány másodperc alatt]!
Another thought comes to mind! Perhaps the warnings on the signs hanging
on the K.Z.’s electrified barbed wire are false as well! Perhaps there really is
no current in the supposedly 6000-volt wire! And yet this one thing must be
true, for I saw with my own eyes how Oberscharführer Mussfeld’s giant po-
lice dog once touched the wire beside the crematorium gate and instantly died.
Speaking of signs, I should mention the sign, read by every former prisoner
of the K.Z., that exhorted: “Work makes you free” [A munka szabaddá tesz].74
This, as I saw, translated into real terms such that on one occasion three wag-
ons stopped in front of the crematorium, and a group of men with lemon-
yellow faces, all wasted away to skin and bones, staggered down from them.
They numbered three hundred. When they entered the crematorium courtyard
I struck up a conversation with them. They told me that they set out three
months ago from Auschwitz Camp “D” in a transport of three thousand peo-
ple. They had worked in a sulfuric-acid factory; many of them had died from
various diseases. They themselves, the three hundred, had gotten sulfur poi-
soning, hence their lemon-yellow complexions. They had been selected out
and set en masse to go to a rest camp.
A half hour later I saw their bloodied corpses laid out before the cremation
furnaces. Work makes you free! A rest camp! Are these not infernal proceed-
ings? There are a few more of them! In June or July, it happened that 100,000
postcards were handed out among the inhabitants of the overcrowded bar-
racks, everyone being required to write one to an acquaintance. They were
given strict orders that they should write as return address not Auschwitz or
Birkenau but rather “Am Waldsee”!75 The only place with such a name is on
the Swiss border! The postcards went out, replies even arrived for them. I was
an eyewitness as they burned the letters sent in reply, about 50,000 of them,
on a bonfire set in the crematorium courtyard. It would not have been possible
to deliver them anyway, for the addressees themselves had been burned before
the replies to their postcards arrived. Thus was it all contrived. The goal was
to reassure and mislead world public opinion.
Chapter XX
In the gas chamber of Crematorium I, 3000 corpses are lying in a heap. The
Sonderkommando men are already picking apart the dead bodies clasped to-
gether in the tower of corpses [hullatorony]. From my room I hear the rumble
of the elevators [felvonók], the banging of their doors. The work proceeds at a
74
Nyiszli translates the German phrase “Arbeit macht frei.”
75
Literally, “at Waldsee.” In German in the original.
rapid tempo. The gas chamber must be freed up. The arrival of a fresh
transport has been announced!
The leader of the gas Kommando [gázkommandó] practically runs through
the door to me and excitedly informs me that during the separation of the
corpses they found a woman still alive at the bottom of the heap.
I grab my always-packed doctor’s bag and race with him down to the gas
chamber. Directly next to the wall near the entrance to the enormous room,
half-buried by corpses, a young woman’s body writhes and gives off gasping
noises. The men of the gas Kommando stand around me in agitation. Such a
thing has never happened in their horrible work! We free the still-moving
body from the corpses lying on top of it. I take it in my arms. I carry it, the
slight body of a young girl, into the room next to the gas chamber [a
gázkamara mellett levő helyiségbe]. Here the gas Kommando was accustomed
to change for their work. I lay the child on a bench, I reckon she is 15 years
old. I pull out my injection kit and I give the scarcely breathing, unconscious
girl three injections one after another in her arms. My men cover the ice-cold
body with a heavy coat. One of them runs to the kitchen [konyhára] to bring
hot tea or soup. Everyone wants to help, as if she were their own child. And
our efforts have an effect too! A fit of coughing which seizes the child brings
forth a thick lump of mucus from her lungs. She opens her eyes and stares up
at the ceiling of the room. I intently observe every sign of life. Her breathing
grows ever deeper. Her gas-tortured lungs hungrily gulp down air. As a result
of the injections I gave, her pulse is already beating quite noticeably. I wait
patiently: the injections have not yet been completely absorbed, but I already
see that in just a few more minutes she will come around. And so it happens.
Her fine-featured little face becomes flushed from the ever increasing circula-
tion of blood, her eyes take on conscious intelligence. She looks around with
great astonishment, her gaze running over us. She closes her eyes again; she
still does not know what is happening to her. She still cannot understand the
present. She does not even know, is this reality? Clearly a veil of fog still
clouds her understanding! In some more-lucid patch of her young brain she
remembers a long line of wagons with which she arrived here. Then she got
into line and before she was even aware of it she was being dragged along
with the great crowd. She arrived in a brightly lit, large underground room.
Everything happened so quickly! She also remembers that everyone had to
undress! This gave her a very bad feeling, but everyone had done it. Thus, na-
ked, she was borne along into another large room. Everyone suddenly became
very nervous. Here too the lights were very bright. Fearfully, she runs her eyes
over the closely huddled crowd. She cannot find her family. Pressing herself
against the wall, she waits for what will happen. Suddenly complete darkness
surrounds her. Something burns her eyes, stifles her throat. She collapses!
Here the light of her memories is extinguished.
Her movements become more and more vigorous. She raises her arms, her
head, she looks left and right with jerking movements of her face. She grabs
my coat by the collar, clutching it spasmodically, she uses all her strength to
try to sit up. Numerous times I lay her back down, but again and again she re-
news her efforts. She has fallen into an acute hysterical condition. Gradually
she calms down, she lies back completely exhausted. Thick tears shimmer in
her eyes, but she does not weep.
I get the first response to my questioning. I do not want to fatigue her, I do
not ask much. I learn that she is 16 years old and that she arrived with her par-
ents in a transport from Transylvania.
She receives some hot broth in a cup. She drinks it all. The Sonderkom-
mando men bring every kind of food, but I do not let them give her any. I cov-
er her up to her neck and tell her to sleep a little.
Thoughts whirl dizzily in my head. I turn to my companions. We reflect,
we puzzle over the problem. Now we come to the hardest part of the matter.
What will become of the child? We know! She cannot stay here long!
Crematorium! Sonderkommando! What can be done here with a young
girl? I know the history of the crematoria; no one has ever gotten out of here
alive, not from the transports, not from the Sonderkommando, which is now
the twelfth Sonderkommando in succession.
There is not much time left for thinking things over. Oberscharführer
Mussfeld is arriving, as per his custom, to look around at the work. As he
passes by the open door of the room he notices the group of us. He enters, he
asks, “What is going on here?” He soon spots the girl lying on the bench. I
motion to my comrades that they should leave. I will attempt the impossible
myself.
Three months spent beneath the same roof have developed a state of confi-
dence between us. Besides, the Germans have the virtue of respecting, even in
the confines of the K.Z., those individuals who are knowledgeable in some
matter which they have need of. So it goes for shoemakers, tailors, carpenters
and locksmiths as well. In the course of our frequent encounters I have often
observed that he respects my professional competence when it comes to my
forensic medical activities. He knows that my employer is Dr. Mengele, chief
physician of the K.Z., the person most feared in everyone’s eyes, a man
whom, with the vanity of his race, he holds to be a great representative of
German medical science. He considers the sending of hundreds of thousands
of Jews to death by gas a patriotic exercise. The work in the dissection hall
stands in the service of the advancement of German medical science. I profit
from this too, as co-worker of the dissection hall. He frequently comes into the
dissection hall, and we talk often of politics, the war situation, and much else
besides. I gather that the reason he respects me is because he sees the dissec-
tion of corpses as a kindred profession to his own bloody work. He is the
commander of Crematorium I and its chief shooter, together with three others.
They perform liquidations by a shot to the back of the neck on such as have
been selected out from the camp or who are sent from other camps here to the
“rest camp,” provided their number does not exceed five hundred! They liqui-
date them with a shot to the back of the neck because they resort to the large-
scale operations of the gas chamber only for the elimination of larger crowds.
The same amount of gas is necessary whether the gas chamber is filled with
500 persons or 3,000. There’s no need for the Red Cross car to come with the
gas canisters and the two gas executioners. Nor is it worth the trouble for a
separate truck to come for the clothes of such a small number of victims. On
the basis of such considerations, they had adopted the shot to the back of the
neck.
I calmly describe the young girl’s terrible situation to him. I sketch for him
the scenes that this child suffered through in the undressing room and before
the death in the gas chamber. When everything turned to darkness around her,
she too inhaled a bit of the cyklon fumes, but only a bit, because her frail
body, at a push from the crowd in its death throes, fell face first into a small
space on the damp concrete floor. This small bit of humidity prevented the gas
from choking her lungs. You should know that cyklon gas is not effective in a
humid medium [a cyklongáz nedves médiumban nem hatásos]!
So I argue, and I ask him to let us do something for the child. He hears me
out seriously and asks me how I would like to resolve the matter. I know it
from myself, but I see from his face as well that I have placed him in a diffi-
cult situation. She cannot stay here in the crematorium! There might be one
solution, namely, that we take her outside the gate. A large female Kommando
is always working on road construction there. She could join in with them, and
when they march into the camp in the evening, she could enter one of the bar-
racks and keep silent about everything that has happened to her. Among so
many thousands no one will even notice, hardly anyone knows one another
here.
If the girl had been 3-4 years older the thing might have succeeded. A
twenty-year old girl already has so much levelheadedness and caution that,
recognizing the fortunate circumstances of her survival, she would not speak
of them with anyone, but rather would wait for better times as so many thou-
sands are doing. But Mussfeld’s point of view is this: a 16-year-old child, in
her naiveté, would tell the first person she met where she had been, what she
had seen and what she had lived through! Such a thing will spread and get out
and all three of us will be lost.
“There’s no helping it,” he says. “The child cannot remain alive!” Looking
at it from a crematorium point of view I realize he is right!
A quarter of an hour later they escorted her, or more accurately, took her
by the arm up to the vestibule of the furnace hall [a kazánterem előcsar-
nokába] where not Mussfeld, but rather another sent in his place, shot her in
the back of the neck.
Chapter XXI
On the first floor76 of Crematorium I, separate from the men’s77 accommoda-
tions, there is a carpentry workshop in which three carpenters perform the
work that crops up in the course of plant operations. At the moment, however,
they are working on a private order. Oberscharführer Mussfeld, taking ad-
vantage of the possibilities here, has given the carpenters orders for the urgent
construction of an enormous, two-person, recamier-style78 sofa bed. They
have undertaken to do it, a task which is not very easily managed in a crema-
torium. Orders, however, do not recognize the impossible! They collected the
necessary wood from among the leftover construction materials in the area of
the crematorium. They culled the springs needed for upholstering the sofa
from the armchairs which the arriving transports brought with them in the
wagons for the use of their sick and elderly. There are dozens of them in the
crematorium courtyard. We used to sit around in them in the evenings.
Thus the sofa is built as ordered! It became an object of daily interest for
me. It took form and moved toward completion before me each day [Előttem
formálódott és készült el egy napon]. It received its springs, its upholstery was
prepared from a Persian carpet. Two French electricians fitted it with a read-
ing lamp as well as a cabinet for a radio. It took a coat of coral-red paint and
looked quite handsome. In a petit bourgeois apartment in Mannheim, it will
look even prettier than here in the attic [padlásán] of the crematorium. Indeed,
at the end of the week, the sofa is going to be sent to Mannheim as bulk goods
to Oberscharführer Mussfeld’s home. There it will stand and wait until the
Oberscharführer victoriously returns after his hard battles, and relaxes upon it
from his exertions.
During this week I was in his room and noticed about half a dozen pairs of
silk pajamas ready for packing. No doubt he will send these home as well, as a
stylish accessory for the sofa bed. Beautiful imported goods! In Germany to-
day it is possible to get anything only on the point system. Here it is possible
to come by things much more easily! They are ready for the taking in the un-
dressing room, packed and waiting! They can be had for a point. The point
goes from Oberscharführer Mussfeld’s 6-millimeter pistol onto the pajamas
owner’s life.79
76
That is, the second floor. See note 28 above.
77
That is, the Sonderkommando’s.
78
In English, recamier (from French récamier) is typically used to designate an asymmetrical couch
or divan, often backless, with a high headrest and low footrest. In Hungarian, however, the word
(spelled, as here, recamier or rekamié) more typically means a sofa bed, often of the pull-out or
folding variety.
79
That is, the bullet serves as final punctuation mark (“point”) to the victim’s life. The Hungarian
word pont, like German Punkt from which it is derived, means “point” in the sense of a mark or
counter, but not in the sense of the sharp end of a weapon. Nyiszli’s pun here functions on an ab-
stract, not a concrete, level.
By means of such points here they obtain jewels, leather coats, women’s
furs, silk clothing, fine shoes. Not a week passes that they do not send home
packages!
In such packages there is tea, coffee, chocolate and preserves by the kilo!
Everything is available in the undressing room! These unlimited possibilities
gave Oberscharführer Mussfeld the idea of the building and sending home of
the sofa bed.
In the days since I began observing the construction of the luxurious bed I
have had an idea. The idea slowly becomes a plan!
After a few more weeks the Sonderkommando’s four-month term [a Son-
derkommandó négyhónapos terminusa] will expire. We will all perish here, on
that point we are entirely clear! We are long since used to this idea, we know
there is no escape. One thing, however, will not leave me in peace, namely,
that so far 11 Sonderkommandos have perished here and taken with them the
terrible secret of the crematoria and the pyres. It must not happen that way
again this time! Even if we do not survive we will ensure that the world comes
to know of the cruelty and banal wickedness, unimaginable to the human
mind, of a people that holds itself to be superior.
A message must go out to the world from here! Perhaps it will be found
sooner, perhaps later, after years. Even then it will proclaim their guilt. The
200 members of the Crematorium I Sonderkommando will sign the message in
the consciousness of their approaching death. And the sofa bed will take it out
to the world beyond the barbed wire, to Oberscharführer Mussfeld’s apart-
ment, for now, in Mannheim.
The message is completed. It exhaustively describes the horrors perpetrat-
ed here in the last few years. We name the executioners of those who perished
here. We report the approximate number of the dead. We make known the
method and instruments of extermination. The message is written on three
large sheets of parchment. The Sonderkommando clerk, a painter from Paris
[egy párizsi festőművész], wrote it in beautiful characters, and to ensure that
the writing would not fade, it was written on the model of old parchment
scrolls with India ink. The fourth sheet contained the 200 signatures of the
Kommando. The parchment sheets were stitched together with fine silk thread.
Rolled into a scroll, it was placed in a thin, cylinder-shaped metal canister
made by one of our tinsmiths [bádogosaink] which was then soldered shut to
make it air- and watertight. Our carpenters placed this case in the wool stuff-
ing between the springs of the sofa.
Another such message with the same text and signatures, also in a soldered
metal canister, was buried in the courtyard of Crematorium II.
Chapter XXII
By now it is an ordinary thing for me that, each evening around seven o’clock,
a truck passes through the crematorium gate and brings seventy to eighty
women or men for liquidation. They are the daily selections of the K.Z. They
arrive here from the barracks and the hospitals. They are K.Z. residents of
many years, or at least many months, so they see their fate with complete clar-
ity. The courtyard is filled with horrible screams and cries of mortal fear as the
truck turns in at the gate. They know that there is no escape from the shadow
of the crematorium chimney! I do not want to watch these daily scenes so I am
accustomed to withdrawing to the most distant part of the crematorium court-
yard. There is a grove of small fir trees [egy kis fenyőfákból álló lugas] there
where I sit down. Here I do not here the crack of the guns, the screams reach
my ears only faintly.
This evening I was unlucky. I have been at work in the dissection hall since
five in the afternoon, I have to do an unscheduled examination in the case of
an SS-Oberscharführer’s suicide. The corpse was sent from Gleiwitz. An SS
captain court-martial judge [SS hadbírószázados] and a clerk have come for
the dissection. At around seven o’clock I am dictating the dissection protocol
to the SS clerk when a big truck turns in with its load, stuffed with men. The
dissection hall’s two large windows, iron-barred and covered with green wire
mesh, look out onto the crematorium’s front courtyard [elülső udvarára]. The
truck stops not far from the windows. Its unfortunate passengers behave very
calmly. From this I conclude that they were selected not from the barracks but
from the hospitals. All gravely ill! They do not even have the strength to
scream, let alone descend from the truck’s high platform. The SS guards
shout, goading them. No one among them moves. The driver, an NCO, loses
patience. He gets back into the cab and sets the truck’s motor running in neu-
tral. The enormous load bed slowly rises with its front part in the air and sud-
denly dumps the people out. The unfortunate, half-dead sick tumble head first,
face first, knees first onto the concrete or upon one another. A terrible cry
comes forth from their throats as they writhe on the ground in their agony.
A horrible scene! The SS court-martial judge, an outsider, is distracted
from his work by the wailing and cries and he asks me: “What is going on out
there in the courtyard?” He comes to the window as well and I explain the
scene to him. It appears that he is unaccustomed to such sights for he turns
away from it in disgust and observes reproachfully: “Still they should not do
that!”
The Sonderkommando gathers the victims’ rags and puts them in a heap in
the courtyard. The unfortunates, on the other hand, are taken into the crema-
tion hall and lined up in front of Oberscharführer Mussfeld, who is standing
there before the furnaces. Today it is his turn to do the shot to the back of the
neck! Gun in a rubber-gloved hand! One after another the bodies fall to make
room for the next in line. In a few minutes he has knocked down – as he is
wont to say, umgelegt80 – all eighty. Half an hour later they are reduced to
ashes [elhamvadtak].
Later, the Oberscharführer visits me in my room and asks me to examine
him. His heartbeat is irregular and he has a headache as well! He takes off his
shirt. I measure his blood pressure, take his pulse, even listen to his heart! I
give him a reassuring report on his complaints. I find no abnormality of any
kind in his heart. His pulse is a little irregular. My opinion is that this is the
consequence of the little job that he performed an hour ago in the furnace hall
[kazánteremben]! I had wanted to calm him, but I achieved the exact opposite.
He leaps up from his seat almost indignantly, stands before me: “Your diagno-
sis is incorrect,” he says, “for I am equally unagitated whether I shoot dead 80
or 1000 people. You know why I am agitated? I’ll tell you! It’s because I
drink a lot!” He departs, looking disappointed!
Chapter XXIII
I am in the habit of doing some reading after going to bed in order to put my-
self to sleep. I do so tonight as usual, but I cannot get much reading done, for
the electric light suddenly goes out and soon I hear the K.Z.’s air-raid siren as
well. On such occasions, heavily armed SS guards accompany us down to the
Sonderkommando’s shelter [a Sonderkommandó óvóhelyére], the gas cham-
ber. So it goes tonight too. We put our clothes on and set out.
With heavy hearts we enter the dark gas chamber. There are two hundred
of us! The entire Kommando. It is a terrible feeling to be in this room knowing
that so many hundreds of thousands of people have found a painful death here.
We also know that the Sonderkommando’s term is drawing to an end and that
such an occasion might come in handy for the SS to slam shut the doors of the
gas chamber and, pouring four canisters of cyklon gas down on us, easily be
done with us. The SS are capable of anything!
It would not be a first! A similar case has occurred before. A part of the
ninth Sonderkommando was taken to the men’s camp of the K.Z., to Barracks
number 13 of Camp “D.” This was an isolated barracks. The Kommando was
told that, on superior orders, their quarters henceforth were not to be in the
crematoria but rather here in the camp. From here they would go out to the
crematoria in two groups. That same evening, they were taken to a bath in
Camp “D” to bathe and get a change of clothing. After bathing they entered,
nude, into the next room, where they were to put on disinfected clothes. This
was a real disinfecting room [fertőtlenítő helyiség], capable of being com-
pletely hermetically sealed. Here they used to disinfect the lousy clothes gath-
80
In German in the original. Literally “laid out (i.e., on the ground),” the word is used colloquially
to mean “killed.”
ered from the camp. Four hundred [négyszáz] Sonderkommando men met their
deaths here by gas. The corpses were carried by truck to the pyres.
Not without cause, then, do we anxiously await the end of the air-raid alert.
The alert was three hours long! We come back up out of the darkness of the
gas chamber! The arc lamps on the barbed wire, the camp’s kilometers-long
chains of light, are lit again. We lie down. I try to sleep. It will be difficult.
The next morning, I am in Crematorium II on my patient-visitation rounds.
The head Kapo of the Sonderkommando there informs me confidentially that
in the darkness of last night’s air-raid alert some partisans approached the
camp. They cut through the wire fence enclosing the crematorium courtyard at
a less conspicuous spot and slipped three machine pistols and ammunition
along with 20 hand grenades through the resulting opening. The Sonderkom-
mando men found them in the early morning hours and brought them to a se-
cure hiding place.
An understandable confidence began to gain ground against the hopeless-
ness of our situation. We knew that the rescuing hands which supplied the
weapons to us could not be far away. Judging from many observations, we
guessed the partisans’ encampment was 25-30 kilometers from the crematoria.
We were confident that at the next opportunity during an air-raid alert they
would bring weapons for us again. Recently there have been air-raid alerts
every day, indeed several times a day, but only a long nighttime blackout can
bring us help from our unknown but devoted comrades. Three or four more
nighttime blackouts would be enough for the partisans to supply us with the
necessary quantity of weapons, and then we could attempt a breakout.
The resistance organization derives from Crematorium III and weaves the
threads of its web throughout the other crematoria.
All of this is done with great caution and circumspection. Death lurks for
us here in the machine pistols of our guards. We want to live! We want to es-
cape from here, and even if it does not work out for all of us, even if it is only
one or two, we still will have won, for then there will be someone who can
take the dark secrets of these terrible factories as a message to the world.
Those who die, on the other hand, will not die like trampled worms at the
filthy hands of their executioners, but rather will be the first in the history of
the German K.Z. who, though outgunned a thousand to one, fall with heads
held high as they deal out death themselves.
Chapter XXIV
One day I am chatting with Oberscharführer Steinberg. He is a frequent visi-
tor of mine in the dissection hall. Under the Second Reich he was a traffic cop
in Berlin, under the Third Reich he joined the SS. I know him for a very dan-
gerous man, both intelligent and evil! He tells me that four of them will be go-
ing away for a few days to an SS resort home located in the mountains of Sile-
sia. In the company will be himself for one, then Oberscharführer Seitz sec-
ond, Rottenführer Holländer third and Rottenführer Eindenmüller fourth. I
know them all well; they are the cruelest executioners of the crematoria. They
are going away, as they say, for five days of rest and recuperation.
I have been in the Sonderkommando for three months [három hónapos
Sonderkommandós vagyok]. If an SS man says of something that it is black,
and I even see so myself, I still do not believe him. If Oberscharführer Stein-
berg speaks to me of recreation, it is quite certainly something special, the ex-
ecution of some bloody task. I believe this all the more because the crematori-
um’s SS personnel may not even leave their posts here lest, after a few glasses
of liquor when mixing with people, they should reveal to them all the matters
that are to be kept secret. They can only depart from here as a closed group
under the command of an officer and they must return here that way! With a
few differences they too are Sonderkommandos. From what I know, after two
years on duty they are sent to an SS camp. In this camp the Third Reich is ac-
customed to dealing with, that is, liquidating, SS men who are insubordinate
or who know too much.
Five days later Oberscharführer Steinberg and his three companions return
from their “recreational leave.” I do not ask anything. They do not say any-
thing. Still on the day of their return I went up to the Sonderkommando’s
kitchen [felmentem a Sonderkommandó konyhájára], where Michel the French
cook always had some tasty morsel for me. He is a valuable and respected
member of the Sonderkommando. This was his profession in civilian life as
well. He was a cook on a luxury ship traveling the Brazilian route of a French
shipping company.
Now too it is with the goal of getting some tasty tidbit to eat that I seek out
the good Michel in his little kitchen [kis konyhájában]. He is not so friendly as
on other occasions. It is plain to see that something has happened to him, for
his ever-smoking seaman’s pipe is in his mouth now as always, jutting out
stiffly to one side, but it is not lit. If he does not notice this, how very agitated
he must be! I am right too, for as soon as I step into the kitchen he closes the
door behind me and takes me by the arm, leading me to a corner where a gal-
vanized-steel tub filled with water is standing on a chair. He draws a green SS
shirt out of the water between two fingers, then a second and a third. All three
shirts are covered with huge blood stains. Only in a slaughterhouse could
someone get himself so bloody. Oberscharführer Steinberg and his compan-
ions were in a slaughterhouse for five days. A human slaughterhouse! I learn
from Michel that they gave him the shirts for washing as soon as they re-
turned.
I was not exaggerating, thus, when I declared that I would not believe the
SS that something is black even if I myself see that it is.
Chapter XXV
The hour of annihilation arrived for the 4500 inhabitants of the Gypsy camp as
well. The measures taken were the same as for the liquidation of the Czech
camp. Barracks lockdown [barakkzárlat]. Numerous SS guards marshalled
with dogs. They bring the Gypsies out of the barracks and line them up. Bread
and salami rations are distributed. Everyone receives three portions, food for a
three-day journey. As far as the Gypsies know they are being taken to another
camp, and as two-year residents of the K.Z. they actually believe it. A very
simple but very effective means of deception. No one thinks of the crematoria,
for they would not be given travel rations to go there.
It is not consideration toward those who are going to die that leads the SS
authorities to deceptive methods but rather simply the requirement that a rela-
tively small number of SS guards be able to conduct a large crowd, as indeed
in this case, without disorder or delay to the gas chamber.
And so it went, too! All through the night the chimneys of Crematoria I
and II spewed flame from themselves [Egész éjszakán át szórták magukból a
lángot az I-es és II-es krematóriumok kéményei]. Their glare lit up the entire
camp! The bustling Gypsy camp has become silent and empty. Only the wire
of the fences still hums, and the doors and windows, left open, of the aban-
doned barracks bang to and fro as the wind passes across them blowing in
from the Volhynian steppes.
Tonight once more Europe’s nation of pyromaniacs has arranged some
fireworks for itself. As ever, the stage is Concentration Camp Auschwitz! The
victims thrown into the flames on this occasion were not Jews, but rather
Christians! Catholic Gypsies from Germany and Austria!
The fires had gone out by morning [Reggelre kialudtak a tüzek]. In each
crematorium courtyard there arose a small, silvery, glistening mound formed
from the victims’ ashes. The corpses of twelve pairs of twins did not go into
the furnaces. Before their death in the gas Dr. Mengele had written two letters
on their chests with leather chalk: Z.S., letters referring them for dissection.81
Pairs of twins of nearly every age, from newborns to 16-year-olds, are in-
cluded in the corpse collection. The bodies of the brown-skinned, black-haired
children lie on the concrete floor of the mortuary hall [hullakamara]. Putting
them in order makes for wearying work; I group them so that sibling is laid
beside sibling. I am careful that they should not get mixed up, for Crimi-
naldoctor [sic] Mengele would make me pay with my life if these incompara-
bly precious and rare specimens for his twin-studies work should become un-
usable.
Just the other day it happened that I was sitting at my laboratory table with
him. We are leafing through the dossiers of the twins processed so far when he
81
The letters stand for zur Sektion (“for dissection”). See Chapter V.
notices a faint grease stain on the light blue cardboard cover of one of them. I
often take them in hand during autopsies, and so it may have happened that
one got a little grease stained. He looks at me reproachfully and asks quite se-
riously: “How can you deal so carelessly with these dossiers which I have so
lovingly collected?” The word “love” heard from Dr. Mengele’s lips[!]. From
sheer amazement not a sound came to my mouth with which I might have an-
swered him.
Chapter XXVI
I perform the autopsies of the twelve pairs of twins’ corpses with the greatest
possible care.
As is well known, there are monozygotic and dizygotic twins. Twins origi-
nating from a single egg cell are of the same sex in all cases and resemble
each other exactly in their external as well as internal traits. We call these
concordant twins. Dizygotic twins are more like normal siblings in their ex-
ternal and internal traits and do not manifest identical, but rather differing,
discordant qualities, in most cases being of opposite sexes. These observations
figure in medical science as laws of heredity for twin biology. These laws are
one of the important proofs of the fact that external influences account only in
small measure for the constitution, body type, and physical and mental traits
of individual humans. Such things as upbringing, good or bad nutrition, and
diseases which may develop over the course of the individual’s life may have
some influence. Much more powerful, however, are those factors which the
individual receives in hereditary form from his or her progenitors. If these fac-
tors recur repeatedly over the course of generations in a single family we call
them dominant, that is, controlling hereditary traits. The forms in which these
hereditary phenomena are manifested can be of good or bad effect, such as:
strong and healthy teeth; rich, non-thinning hair; the disease known as St. Vi-
tus dance; one type of high blood pressure; diabetes in certain families; and
among mental illnesses, manic-depressive psychosis.
Hereditary traits, whether good or bad, manifest themselves in part already
from birth. Such are those cases where newborns have a larger or smaller
number of digits than normal on their hands or feet. There are other traits
which manifest themselves only at a later time and become chronic illnesses,
such as: asthma; epilepsy, or St. Vitus dance; the type of high blood pressure
already mentioned; certain forms of cancer; and senile cataracts of the eye,
this last being a disease of those past seventy years old.
Hereditary traits sometimes display the strange characteristic of manifest-
ing themselves more often in one sex than in the other. The explanation for
this is that these are gender-determined hereditary traits. As most frequent
among these I might mention color-blindness [színvakságot] and anemia [vér-
szegénységet].82 These conditions can be observed exclusively in males. They

do not occur in women. In the most-frequent hereditary form of anemia [sic],
transmission proceeds from an affected grandfather through a healthy daugh-
ter to the grandsons. Boys never acquire susceptibility to the disease from an
affected father. All the sons of an affected father and their descendants,
whether male or female, will be healthy. However, the healthy women born to
an affected father nonetheless carry the hereditary factors within themselves
and each of their female children will pass it along, as I mentioned, to their
male children.
The bodies of a pair of fifteen-year-old twins are lying on the dissecting ta-
ble. I perform a parallel, comparative autopsy of the two siblings.
The two heads in this case show nothing worth assessing. The next step is
the removal of the sternum. A singular phenomenon greets my eyes. Thymus
persistens, the phenomenon of an abiding thymus gland, is present in both
twins.
The thymus gland normally appears only in children, extending from the
upper edge of the sternum to the heart, a rather extensive form which tends
rapidly to atrophy with the onset of sexual maturity and, withering away com-
pletely, leaves behind only a small patch of fat with a few remnants of tissue
from the former gland.
The thymus gland has a large influence on growth in body height.83 Among
the most important symptoms of prematurely atrophied thymus are dwarfism
and extensive fragility of the tubular bones. Hypertrophy of the gland, on the
other hand, can often be observed in the autopsies of children who have died
suddenly without any disease or explicable causes. Hypertrophy of the gland
also has been observed in cases of excessively weak resistance to infectious
diseases.
The glands found in the two twins are thus possessed of extraordinary in-
terest, for not only are they present in 15-year-old twin siblings even though
they should have disappeared by the age of 13, but they present dimensions
much greater than the normal size. I dissect still another pair of fifteen-year-
old twins and two pairs of 16-year-olds, all of them monozygotic twins. In
each the thymus gland is present in the same enlarged form.
I dissect the lumbar and sacral sections of the spinal column in eight pairs
of twins,84 all monozygotic. The fourth and fifth vertebrae of the lumbar sec-
82
Sic. As his subsequent description of the disease’s transmission through the (asymptomatic) fe-
male line makes apparent, Nyiszli clearly is thinking here of hemophilia, but in the text here and
below he uses vérszegénység (lit. “poverty of blood,” anemia) instead of the correct vérzékenység
(lit. “tendency to blood [loss],” hemophilia). (Besides vérzékenység, the Greco-Latin medical term
hemofília itself may also be used for the disease in Hungarian.)
83
Literally, body length: a test hosszúság.
84
Sic: “Nyolc pár ikernél…” With the change of paragraph Nyiszli introduces a new theme to his
discussion. He is not referring here to the eight twins identified as having thymus irregularities in
the previous paragraph, but rather simply to eight (unspecified) pairs of twins, among whom the
tion as well as the sacral section display a developmental disorder which man-
ifests itself such that these parts have not closed with the onset of age 12-13
but have remained abnormally open even at 15-16 years. Doctors call this de-
velopmental disorder Spina bifida and it is known as a deformity which may
involve serious consequences.
The development of the individual occurs in the two directions of the spi-
nal column. The one direction of development is the cranium, the other is the
pelvic basin, that is, the direction of the tail bone. The former tendency is
called cranial, the latter caudal, accordingly as one or the other direction is
preponderant.
In the present case, the developmental tendency is cranial, not caudal, in
the 16 twins dissected, for Spina bifida and the persistence of an unclosed sa-
crum are degenerative symptoms.
I discovered another important developmental anomaly in 5 pairs of twins
among the 12 pairs dissected, a fluctuating tenth rib on the right hand side, so
called Costa decima fluctuans. In normal cases this rib is fixed. Its fluctuation
is a developmental anomaly in the caudal, tailbone direction of the spinal col-
umn.
The fluctuation of the tenth rib can be diagnosed in regular practice among
the living as well. It occurs, naturally quite rarely, in individuals of asthenic
type, thin, tall, with weak musculature and low blood pressure, who tire easily.
All of these interesting observations, though in a much more-exhaustive
and medically precise form, I commit to paper in the shape of an autopsy pro-
tocol. I spend long afternoons with Dr. Mengele on the clarification of this or
that obscure problem. In the dissection hall and in the laboratory I explained
and defended my own point of view not in the role of a humble K.Z. prisoner,
but rather, just as if in a medical conference, as an entirely equally ranked
doctor, and I refuted the opinions he expressed if I did not agree with them.
I am a good judge of people and I think that this doctorly comportment of
mine, as well as my determined demeanor, my measured speech, and when
necessary my silence, were the qualities by which I arrived at it that Dr.
Mengele, before whom even the SS trembled at the knees in fear, offered me a
cigarette on the occasion of one of our lively discussions and saluted as he de-
parted the laboratory.
Chapter XXVII
On one occasion I was dissecting the corpse of an elderly man and as an inci-
dental finding I discovered some beautiful gallstone crystals in the gall blad-
der. I knew that Dr. Mengele was a passionate collector of such rarities. I
four pairs already mentioned may or may not be included. This is confirmed by his reference to
“the 16 twins dissected” two paragraphs below.
washed and dried them and placed them in a wide-mouth, glass-stoppered

phial. I provided the phial with a label containing the autopsy data for the gall-
stones’ owner as well as a qualitative description. The next day during his vis-
it I gave them to him. The beautiful crystals pleased him greatly. He studies
them, turning the vial this way and that, and then turning to me with a sudden
movement he puts the question to me, do I know the ballad of General Wal-
lenstein? His question was not at all appropriate to the circumstances but I an-
swered him: “I know the story of General Wallenstein but I don’t know the
ballad.” He smiles to himself at this and begins to recite:
Im Besitze der Familie Wallenstein
Ist mehr Gallenstein, wie Edelstein.85
Translated, this would go more or less like so:
In the possession of family Wallenstein
There are more gallstones than gemstones.
My boss recited a few more verses of the mock-epic poem and was in such
a good mood that I resolved on a large venture myself. I asked him for per-
mission to meet with my wife and daughter. Even as I spoke my request I
knew that it was dangerous, but now it is done. He looks at me in astonish-
ment. “You’re married and have a child?” he asks. “Yes, captain, I have a
wife and a 15-year-old girl,” I reply, a little emotionally.
“You think that they are here?”
“I think so, captain, yes, for three months ago [ezelőtt három hónappal]
when we arrived you selected them to the right, sir.”
“It is possible that they have been sent to another camp since,” he replies.
I think suddenly of the smoke from the crematorium chimney, perhaps they
have been sent with it to a celestial Kommando! He sits at his table, leaning
his head on his chin; I am standing beside him. He appears to deliberate. “I
will give you a Passierschein,86 you may search for them, but…” he puts his
index finger to his lips and looks at me. It’s like there is a menace in his gaze.
“I understand,” I say, “and I am very grateful, sir.”
Dr. Mengele departs. With the Passierschein in my hands I go happily to
my room. I read: “Number A-8450 is authorized to circulate within the
grounds of K.Z. Auschwitz without an escort. This authorization is valid until
revoked. Dr. Mengele SS-Hauptsturmführer.” I am completely beside myself
with excitement. Such a thing has never happened in the history of the camps,
a K.Z. prisoner receiving permission to seek out his family and go without es-
cort into the women’s camp. I do not even know where to begin. The women
are in camps “C” and “B III” as well as in the “FKL.” The majority of the
Hungarians, so I have heard, are in Camp “C.” There might be 50,000 of
them. I will go there first! The next morning I wake up exhausted. I did not
85
86
sleep all night. Terrible doubts tormented me. Three months is a long time. An
hour here is a long time! Since then all sorts of things have happened. I know
only too well what happens here every hour of the day.
I go to the SS office, I announce my departure. I take my leave from my
companions. Everyone wishes me a good trip. It is a hot August morning [au-
gusztusi reggel] as I set off on the three-kilometer way [a három kilométeres
útra]. Camp C is much closer as the crow flies, but I must move within the
large guard chain and bypass several parts of the camp to arrive there. With a
thrill of curiosity and fear I step onto the dead zone path leading between two
rows of electrified wire. Anyone walking in this zone will not be shot at with-
out warning from the guard towers. SS motorcycle patrols circulate here,
shiny copper plates hanging around their necks on chains with the inscription
Lagerpolizei.87
I encounter several camp guards, but they do not check my papers. I reach
the Camp C gate, a huge, two-leaved iron gate. The two leaves of the gate are
full of heavy porcelain insulators and densely woven with barbed wire. Before
it, as before the gate to every part of the camp, stands a guardhouse. Some SS
soldiers are sitting on a bench basking in the sun. They look me over. I am an
unusual guest, but they do not speak. They do not meddle in the duties of their
colleague, who sits in the window of the hut. I approach him and announce
my tattoo number. He looks at me quizzically. I take Dr. Mengele’s paper
from my pocket and hand it to him. He reads it through and gives orders to his
companions for the opening of the gate! He asks me how long I intend to re-
main in the camp. He must write it down so that I depart again at the stated
time. It was ten o’clock in the morning when I arrived before the gate; I an-
swered, “Until twelve.” That’s a long time, but a ten-pack of Josma cigarettes
is a good Passierschein in every part of the K.Z. I hand them to him and leave.
Along Camp C’s main street, which is lined with shabby green barracks,
there’s a great coming and going. A group of women carries a tinplate tub full
of hot soup. Distribution of lunch here is at ten o’clock in the morning. An-
other group, a road-repair Kommando, carries stones for the roadbed. On both
sides of the street many women are lying in the sun. Their bodies are wrapped
in rags, their hair is shaved; they present a pitiable sight. Dressed for the most
part in fantastical clothes, in floor-length, sleeveless, deep-cut evening gowns,
ragged now, they lie on the ground and pick lice from themselves or from
their companions. The visible parts of their bodies are covered with dirt mixed
with running sores. This is a quarantine camp; the women do not work here.
From here the transports headed for more-distant labor camps are selected. Se-
lections are carried out quite thoroughly, as I can see. What remains behind is
completely exhausted human material. Happy are those who have gone on!
87
“Camp Police.” In German in the original.
They still have some hope of pulling through this period, but the fate of these
here is sealed, just as it was for the Czech or the Gypsy camp.
I make my way to the first barracks. Wild shouts and cries greet me from
all sides. The clumps of rags lying on the ground come to life and, leaping up
from their places, run toward me. There might be thirty who recognize me and
inquire about their husbands and children, questioning me with anxious impa-
tience.
They all recognize me because I have a normal, human appearance, but
they themselves are very difficult to recognize, these unfortunates. My situa-
tion here in the crowd starts to become uncomfortable. They keep coming, ev-
er more and more of them. They all would like to know something of their
family. They have lived for three months [három hónapja] among the most
horrible conditions, in continuous fear. Every week there is a selection [Min-
den héten szelekció van]. Three months in the K.Z. have taught them to bewail
the past and to fear the future. The unfortunates all ask me, is it true about the
crematorium? What is the great mass of smoke by day [a nagy fűst nappal],
and what is the great fire by night [a nagy tűz éjjel]? Are they really burning
people? I reassure them as best I can. I deny everything. None of it is true at
all. Besides, soon it will be the end of the war and we will go home. I do not
believe it myself, but I say it so that they will calm down. I leave them there; I
have learned nothing at all of my wife and daughter.
I go into the first barracks. I ask the overseer, a Slovakian girl, to call out
their names. In one barracks there are around 800-1000 women pressed to-
gether in stacked-bunk boxes [emeletes bokszokban]29 ranged on either side. It
is difficult to call out names here. The clamor of a thousand women over-
whelms the searchers’ voices. They return after a few minutes and report on
the fruitlessness of their efforts. I thank them for their kindness and enter the
next barracks.
Here it is the same situation; the previous scene repeats itself in the same
way. No success in the second barracks either. Now I am in the third barracks.
I stop in the middle of the hall and ask a woman to call the overseer. I ask her
to look for my family. She sends two lively young girls on their way along
both sides of the barracks. They call into every box and then suddenly they are
bringing my wife and daughter.
They approach with eyes opened wide from fear, holding hands. It is not a
good sign if someone is called for in the barracks. Then they have recognized
me, they stop as if frozen with surprise. I hurry toward them and embrace and
kiss them both at once. They cannot find their voices, they merely weep bitter-
ly. I calm them; already a crowd of the curious is standing around us. I cannot
speak with them like this. I ask the overseer to allow us into her little room. At
last we are alone!
They tell me all the bitter experiences of their three-month existence here.
They speak of the terrible selections which they have lived through, always
trembling in the shadow of the crematoria’s chimneys. They are hungry, they
are cold in their rags! The rain comes into the barracks and their clothes can-
not dry out! Their food is inedible, but what is worst of all, they cannot even
sleep! In the box there should be room for seven people, but twelve are
crammed in! They tear at, kick, shove one another, women belonging to the
so-called better social classes at home, all so they can secure a few centime-
ters more space for their own comfort at the expense of another. Here every-
one has been stripped of their essential decency! Close acquaintances and
strangers alike look to their own interests and are unwilling to make even the
slightest concession. My little girl tells me that for weeks she has slept sitting
on the concrete floor because in the box where her mother lies they do not
want to squeeze in a space for her.
My wife asks me where I work. I tell her that I work alongside Dr.
Mengele in the crematorium and that I am a member of the Sonderkommando.
After three months in the K.Z. they too know that the “Sonder” is the Kom-
mando of the walking dead. The two of them stare at me, terrified. I reassure
them somewhat and take my leave with the promise that I will come again
tomorrow.
It was a great sensation in the crematorium that I had found my wife and
child! From the clothing department [a ruhaosztályról] I packed together
warm clothes, underwear and stockings in a knapsack. From the toiletries de-
partment [a toalett-osztályról] I took toothbrushes, fine soaps, nail clippers,
pocket knives, fine-toothed combs, at least ten of everything! I packed medi-
cines, vitamin tablets, ointments for wounds, bandages, anything that might be
useful. I took sugar cubes, butter, apricot jam, bread, enough that there would
be some for others too! Thus I headed out for Camp “C.” I was there every
day, always with a full knapsack! All good things, however, come to an end!
For two weeks [két hete] I am a daily visitor in Camp “C.” Then one day
that which I was afraid of came to pass. Already with the liquidation of the
Czech and Gypsy camps I had become convinced that annihilation here is on-
ly a question of time. Sooner or later it comes for everyone who lives out his
miserable days within the wire of K.Z. Auschwitz!
One afternoon I am sitting in the laboratory at my work table. Dr. Mengele
and Dr. Thilo are present. They are talking with each other about administra-
tive matters of the K.Z. Dr. Mengele rises from his seat and, as if he has just
made up his mind on the question, he says to Dr. Thilo: “I am no longer in a
position to feed the debilitated residents of Camp C who are not working. I
will liquidate them within two weeks!”
Conversations of this nature are often carried on in my presence. They
would discuss the most secret affairs of the K.Z. as if I was not even there. I
was a dead man walking who did not count.
Dr. Mengele’s decision regarding the liquidation of Camp “C” shook me

deeply. This concerned my own family and the lives of thousands of my un-
fortunate female compatriots. I must act immediately!
Scarcely had Dr. Mengele and Dr. Thilo left the crematorium building than
I too was outside the gate. I made my way directly to Camp “D.” In this camp
was the office of the SS group that managed the forced-labor assignments of
foreign K.Z. detainees. This SS group selects and transfers K.Z. prisoners in
demand to labor camps and war factories throughout the territory of the Reich.
The head of the office is an Oberscharführer. I find him alone in his room. I
introduce myself and present Dr. Mengele’s still-valid Passierschein.
I explain to him that my wife and daughter are residents of Camp “C.”
With the assistance of Dr. Mengele I looked for them and found them. I have
helped them a great deal, yet I feel it is very important and urgent that they be
sent on from here, for as a crematorium employee I know what sort of fate
awaits those who remain here. He fully shares my view and he promises his
assistance. This week two transports of 3,000 are leaving Camp “C” for war
factories in western Germany. These factories are the ideal workplace, for the
housing, food and treatment there do not aim at extermination, but rather at
the maintenance of the workers in good condition for the attainment of as
great a work output as possible. I take a box of one hundred cigarettes from
my pocket and put it on the table.
He takes the box and promises me that if my wife and daughter present
themselves to him at the selection he will assign them to a transport. I have
achieved what I desired. I hurry to Camp “C”! There my work will be more
difficult. I must bring my family to understand that they must depart from
here. I cannot tell the truth, I do not want to cause a panic. That would be cat-
astrophic for all of us. I call my wife and daughter into the overseer’s little
room, I tell them that this is hard for me, but the course of events requires that
they depart from here. They will have to give up the lifeline of my support. I
too will have to give up seeing them and looking after them. This week there
will be a selection here for the formation of two large transports. They must
volunteer for one of them, preferably the first! I explained to my wife that se-
rious reasons compelled me to advise this. I also asked her to tell all her ac-
quaintances that they should volunteer for one of the two transports. She
should not say anything else! The situation during selections, namely, is that
the SS selection commission puts volunteers on the transports first, and only if
the number is not complete do they then use forced selection. Volunteers,
however, rarely appear, for no one is willing to exchange the advantage of the
present situation – of not having to work – for another situation. Hardly any-
one is willing to go do hard labor on rations that are inadequate even for life
here in the quarantine without working.
Short-sighted women! Poor things! If they understood the K.Z. mentality

of the Third Reich, they would know that anyone who does not work may not
live!
My wife and daughter could see that there might be a well-founded reason
for this serious decision of mine and promised that they would volunteer at the
first selection. I took my leave with the promise that in two days I would visit
them again and bring warm clothes and food for the journey.
The two days passed and I went to Camp “C” to say goodbye. I carried
with me warm clothes and plenty of food, but I did not go alone! I did not dare
carry so much baggage through the Camp “C” gate. It could happen that high-
ranking SS personnel are lurking nearby. For this reason I asked one of our
crematorium SS, a former patient of mine whom I recently cured of a serious
case of pneumonia, to come with me and help with the tossing of the packag-
es! I did not seek out my family in the barracks on this occasion, but rather
called them to the fence and spoke to them there. With my SS companion I
then tossed the packages over to them. Fortunately the surroundings were so
deserted that no one noticed. Between us stood the wire fence; we were not
even able to hug one another! We talked for a few minutes. My wife tells me
that the registration went smoothly. It was not even necessary that she present
herself before the selecting Oberscharführer. They registered both of them. I
was glad to hear that, on my wife’s advice, many had volunteered.
Chapter XXVIII
Three days later I visited Camp “C” again. I wanted to confirm their departure
on site. Everything had gone as I had hoped. The two 3000-person transports
had departed the Auschwitz camp. They too had gone with them. I do not
know what the future has in store for them, yet I feel a great sense of relief.
Here certain death awaited them; in a new location, with a little luck, libera-
tion! I can see from numerous signs that the war is nearing its end. The Third
Reich’s grave is being dug already. Those who depart from here may hope;
within myself, however, awareness of the hopelessness of my own fate grows
with renewed strength!
It fills me with deep satisfaction that I have been able to direct their steps,
and that they have been able to deviate from the path which ends at the pyres
while I go on to certain death! It is not despair, it is not fear which shapes this
into consciousness before me, but rather the bloody tragedy of eleven
Sonderkommandos and the cold objectivity of my own logic, devoid of all
sentimentality!
I leave Camp “C”; my eyes run over the somber barracks in parting. With
deep, aching sympathy my gaze takes its leave of the misshapen figures –
heads shaved, dressed in rags, stripped of all human dignity – of our once
well-groomed, beautiful girls and women. A chill runs all through me and
shakes my whole body as I step through the gate. Only now as I pull my jacket
together more closely do I perceive that it is autumn. It is the end of Septem-
ber! The north wind [északi szél] blows from the already snow-covered peaks
of the Beskids,88 it shakes the barbed wire of the K.Z. and agitates the flames
of the crematoria chimneys [a krematóriumok kéményeinek lángjait]. Here
and there crows flap about, the only bird that lives in this place. The wind
brings me puffs of smoke from the crematoria built to last forever, the now-
familiar stench of the burning flesh and singed hair of the dead.
My days and nights pass in paralyzed inactivity and anxious sleeplessness.
I have no words, no desires! Since my family went away I feel like the loneli-
ness is strangling me. Helplessness tortures me.
For days, silence and an immense monotony have lain over Concentration
Camp Auschwitz. A bad sign! My premonitions never deceive me. The great
silence is an omen of further bloody events to come. The twelfth Sonderkom-
mando has already used up three and a half months of its fixed four-month
lifespan. The sand is running quickly in the hourglass of our lives; the time is
two weeks now!
Dr. Mengele carried out his decision. The liquidation of Camp “C” began.
Fifty trucks requisitioned for this purpose brought the victims to the cremato-
rium [a krematóriumba] every evening in groups of four thousand. The long
line of floodlit trucks made for a terrible spectacle as they turned in to the
crematorium [krematórium] courtyard with their cargo, frenzied and scream-
ing in terror or paralyzed into silence by the fear of death. One after another,
before the entranceway leading below ground, they unloaded the already-
naked unfortunates, and these were then driven down into the gas chamber.
Every one of them was aware that they were going to their deaths by gas here,
but the rigors of their four-month imprisonment and their body- and soul-
killing sufferings, the slow collapse of their nervous systems, had deadened in
them all sensation and capacity for the display of will. They let themselves be
driven without resistance into the gas chamber where, weary of their broken,
worn-out lives, they awaited death, that they might exchange for it their now-
purposeless lives, which only gave them immeasurable physical and mental
suffering. How long was their journey leading here! How much suffering sur-
passing human imagination did each stage of this journey bring them! Their
warm, peaceful family homes suffused with love were ravaged and plundered!
With their husbands, with their children, with their aged parents, they were
hauled away to brick factories located outside their cities where they lay for
weeks in pools of spring rain. This was the ghetto: from here they were
brought in groups each day to the specially equipped torture chambers, where
they were tortured and beaten with thumbscrews and rubber truncheons until,
88
Traditional name for that section of the Western Carpathian Mountains lying along the Slovak-
Polish border.
half-fainting from pain, they told where they had hidden, or to whom they had
given, their valuables. Many had died from the tortures. Those who remained
were almost relieved when they were put into the wagons, even if with 80-90
others like themselves!
Thus they traveled for four or five days, in the company of those who died
along the way, until they arrived at the Jews’ ramp of Concentration Camp
Auschwitz. What happened to them there we already know. Separated from
their husbands, their parents, their children, they went half mad from the pain
in their childlike, wifely, motherly hearts as they were selected rightward into
the barracks of Camp “C.” Before they entered these halls of filth, lice and in-
fectious disease they had to pass through one last phase, a procedure for the
divestment of human dignity, the bath.
Rough hands cropped their well-groomed tresses and stripped the clothes
from their bodies. After the bath they were given others, but of a sort which
even a roadside beggar would have thrown away in disgust. Along with these
clothes they received the Third Reich’s first benefits allotment: lice.
After such preliminaries they began their shadowy lives enclosed within
the barbed wire of the K.Z. Their poor diet of watery swill did not let them die
of hunger, but neither did it let them live. Protein was completely lacking from
their diet, the deficiency made their legs heavy like lead. The lack of fat made
their bodies swell. Their regular menstrual cycle fell away. The consequences
of this were nervousness, headaches, frequent nosebleeds. The lack of vitamin
“B” provoked constant drowsiness and forgetfulness, which reached the point
that they forgot even the name of the street they lived on and the number of
their house. Only in their eyes did some life still appear, but there glimmered
in them not the bright flame of intelligence, but rather the hazy, smothered fire
of a consciousness dimmed by hunger and physical and mental pain.
In such conditions they stood through to the end of the hours-long Zählap-
pel,89 the roll call, and if they dropped out of the line fainting, the first thing
their glance fell upon when they came to from the cold water poured on them
was the smoke billowing over the K.Z. [a K.Z. fölött gomolygó füstre] and the
blazing flames of the crematorium chimneys [a krematórium kéményeinek lo-
bogó lángjára]. These two signs, the smoke and the flames, let them know at
all hours of the day that they were standing at the gates to next world.
For four months the inhabitants of Camp “C” had lived before the gates of
the crematoria and it took ten days before those going to their deaths had all
passed through them. The souls had departed from forty-five thousand [ne-
gyvenötezer] tormented bodies, and over Camp “C,” the temporary home of so
many bearers of tragedy, there now falls an immense silence!
89
In German in the original, correctly Zählappell.
Chapter XXIX
Thus the Sonderkommando awaits the final blow of destiny! Days, weeks,
months had passed, it hangs continuously over our heads; soon the horror will
arrive. Execution, when everything falls into darkness and turns to ashes! We
are ready. Every hour of the day we expect that the SS executioners will open
up on us.
In the morning hours of October 6, 1944, outside the neutral zone between
the small and large guard chains, a weapon rang out from one of the guard
towers and a K.Z. prisoner fell to the ground dead. The prisoner, a former
Russian officer who had been sent here from a prisoner-of-war camp as pun-
ishment for an escape attempt, in all probability was attempting escape here as
well, and thus wound up in front of the guard’s weapon. A commission of the
political SS headed by Dr. Mengele rushed to the scene in order to investigate
the incident on site. It was an ordinary incident, the sort that happened every
day. If the victim had been a Jew, he would simply have gone to the mortuary
hall and from there to the crematorium without any formalities, but as a Rus-
sian officer he was registered, complete with name and personal data. In order
to justify the violent death an autopsy report was needed. At the end of the on-
site inspection, Dr. Mengele had the body brought to the crematorium and or-
dered its forensic-medical autopsy! According to his orders, the report must be
ready by two-thirty in the afternoon. He wants to pick it up in person and con-
firm its results on the corpse.
The time was about nine o’clock in the morning when Dr. Mengele left the
dissection hall. I had the corpse placed on the dissecting table, I could have
been done with the dissection and the autopsy protocol in thirty to forty
minutes, but it was the sixth of October, the second-to-last or last day of the
Sonderkommando’s term [de október 6. volt, a Sonderkommandó termi-
nusának utolsóelőtti, vagy utolsó napja]. We did not know for certain, but I
sensed the nearness of death. I was incapable of working. I left the dissection
hall and withdrew to my room. I took a large dose of Luminal and smoked one
cigarette after another. I did not have the patience to stay there either, so I
went into the cremation hall [égető terembe]. The men of the day shift per-
formed their work only sluggishly, even though several hundred corpses lay
before the furnaces [a kazánok előtt]. Huddling together in small groups, they
talked quietly. I went upstairs to the staff quarters, where the strangeness of
the situation immediately became apparent to me. Usually the Sonderkom-
mando’s night shift ate breakfast after morning roll call and went to sleep.
Now it is ten a.m., and everyone is on their feet. I also notice that the men are
in sports clothes, pullovers and boots, though a bright, warm October sun is
shining outside. They bustle about this way and that, they pack and repack
their suitcases, talking quietly. Even so I sense the enormous tension which
fills everything here. Something is afoot here, I sense it clearly. I enter the
head Kapo’s separate little room; he is sitting at the table. Around him the
foreman of the night shift, the mechanical engineer, the chief stoker and the
commander of the gas Kommando take their places.
No sooner have I sat down than they pour me out half a tumbler from a
bottle of brandy that sits on the table, already half empty. The strongest Polish
liquor, the famous fennel-seed brandy, fills my glass. I drink it down in one
gulp! In the final hours of the Sonderkommando’s four months it may not be a
lifesaving remedy, but it’s a great medicine against the fear of death!
My companions inform me in detail about our situation. According to the
signs and information acquired, the liquidation of the Sonderkommando could
only follow the next day, possibly the day after, but all necessary measures are
in place so that the 860 men of the Sonderkommando can break out of the
crematorium tonight. Heading: the Vistula River, which meanders along two
kilometers away and which now, at the end of summer, is so shallow that it
can easily be waded. At a distance of eight kilometers from the Vistula there
then follows a wooded region which extends across the whole of Poland [mely
átnyúlik egész Lengyelországig]. Here we will be able to stay safely for
weeks, even months. We are certain to meet partisans as well.
Our weapons supply is sufficient for the execution of the plan. In the last
few days, around a hundred boxes of high-explosive ecrasite90 have arrived
from the Auschwitz Unio91 factory, a large plant which exclusively manufac-
tures munitions and which employs Polish-Jewish women prisoners. The
Germans use these boxes for blowing up railway tracks. Besides these, there
are five machine pistols and twenty hand grenades in the weapons cache. This
is sufficient for the execution of the plan, for we intend first to secretly ap-
proach the solitary night watch guards at their posts and render them harmless
with knives. Thus taking by surprise the SS sleeping in their room [a szo-
bájukban], we intend to force them to come with us for as long as we see fit…
The signal for the breakout will be given with an electric hand lamp from
Crematorium I to II, and so on to III and IV. To my mind, the plan seems all
the more feasible in that today, with the exception of Crematorium I, there are
no cremations anywhere. They will be finished here too by six o’clock in the
evening, so the Sonderkommando does not have to supply a night shift today.
On such occasions the SS night shift is smaller as well. In each crematorium
the watch consists of three men.
90
Ecrasite (Hungarian ekrazit, German Ecrasit) is the name of an explosive material developed in
Austro-Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century, originally for use in artillery shells. It is de-
scribed in a contemporary source as “a bright yellow solid… [which] ignites when brought into
contact with an incandescent body or open flame, burning harmlessly away unless strongly con-
fined, and is insensitive to friction or concussion. It is claimed to possess double the strength of
dynamite and requires a special detonator… to provoke its full force.” (Sanford 1906, p. 159). The
boxes referred to by Nyiszli would presumably have been fairly small; the Hungarian word in
question, szelence, usually indicates a small, decorative metal box, like a snuffbox or cigar case.
91
Sic. The plant in question was officially known as the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke.
We part with the agreement that until the signal everyone is to perform his
work as usual and avoid all such actions as might arouse suspicions.
I head back to my room; again I have to go through the furnace hall [kaz-
ántermen]. The men are doing their work, though a little slowly. I inform my
two doctor colleagues about the situation. I say nothing to the autopsy assis-
tant. He is a long-time prisoner of the K.Z.; I do not trust him. The accom-
plished facts will sweep him along with themselves soon enough.
Slowly the time for lunch arrived. We ate our food quietly and went out in-
to the autumn sun to bask a little in the crematorium courtyard with our com-
rades. It struck me that I cannot see anyone from our SS guards. They are
probably staying in their room. This has happened on other occasions as well.
The gates are closed. Outside, the camp SS are attending to their duties. They
are at their posts. Thus I do not attach any importance to this. I quietly smoke
a cigarette. The knowledge that tonight we would be beyond the wires and
free again has lifted from me the terrible pressure that has weighed upon me
for four months now. If it fails, I still will have lost nothing!
I look at my wristwatch, its hands show half past one. I stand up and call
my companions in for the completion of the autopsy so that at half past two,
when Dr. Mengele arrives, we will be ready. Without a word they follow me
into the dissection hall. We immediately get down to work. Today one of my
fellow doctors performs the autopsy. I sit at the typewriter and write the pro-
tocol. We have been working quietly like that for about twenty minutes when
a huge explosion shakes the air, followed by a dense clatter of machine pistol
fire. I look out the large, green-screened window and see that the huge, red-
tiled roof of Krema III [a III-as krema ]92 is lying open together with its beam
structure; an enormous plume of flame and black smoke ascends high into the
sky. Barely a minute later a clatter of machine pistols rings out directly in
front of the dissection hall door. We have no idea what has happened. Our
plans spoke of tonight. It could only be that we have been betrayed, and the
SS has intervened in time, or that a large number of partisans has attacked the
crematoria! The wail of alarm sirens sounds out from Auschwitz I and
Auschwitz II. The explosions and the clatter of machine pistols grow ever
stronger. Now heavy machine guns break in as well. I decided quickly. I held
that it would be most sensible, whether a betrayal or a partisan attack has oc-
curred, that we stay in the dissection hall. We will await the development of
events here at our posts. Through the window I note the arrival of 8-10 trucks
[nyolc-tíz teherautó]. They brake in front of Krema I, our crematorium, and
half a battalion worth of soldiers jump down from them and draw up in lines
in front of the barbed-wire fence…
92
Sic. Readers may recall here that Nyiszli numbers the Birkenau crematoria with the Roman nu-
merals I to IV, in contrast with modern practice, which reserves the number I for the disused
crematorium at the Auschwitz Main Camp, and gives the Birkenau crematoria numbers II through
V. The “Krema III” mentioned here thus is actually Crematorium IV. See Note 15 above.
The situation is clear to me now. The Sonderkommando has seized control

of Crematorium I; it is shooting and launching hand grenades at the lines of
SS mustering before the gate. The defense appears to be effective, for I see
several SS soldiers collapse, wounded or dead. This soon led the besiegers to
resort to more-effective methods. They bring forward forty or fifty trained
bloodhounds and incite them against the defenders inside the crematorium, but
to my amazement the dogs, at other times so eager and fierce, do not move;
indeed they cower, whining, behind their SS masters’ backs. I explain this by
the fact that the dogs are trained against prisoners in striped clothing; here
there are no such uniforms, though there is something else which is unfamiliar
to the dogs. In the crematorium and its surroundings a penetrating stench of
blood, burnt flesh and bone is pervasive. And of that the bloodhounds, with
their exquisite sense of smell, were afraid. When this attempt of the SS proved
unsuccessful, though still under continuous fire [they brought up two cannons]
from an anti-aircraft battery93 and began to put them into position pointed at
the crematorium building.
The Sonderkommando could not withstand such superiority in numbers and
weapons. A powerful shout of “hurrah” shook the building and the Sonder-
kommando rushed out the back door of the crematorium [a krematórium…
hátsó ajtóin]. They break out through the previously cut electrical wire, and at
a running pace, firing continuously at the SS standing along the guard chain
line, they aim their flight toward the bend of the Vistula. An extremely intense
firefight sprang up between the SS and the escapees. I hear clearly as the
heavy machine guns of the guard towers break in among the clatter of guns
and the detonations of hand grenades and explosives boxes. It probably did
not last ten minutes, and then everything was still.
Now the SS standing in lines on the front side of the building also start to
attack, without using the two cannons. With bayonets fixed, they attack the
building from several sides and pour into every room on the ground and first
floors. A group of ten barged into the dissection hall. With weapons drawn
against us they surrounded us and under a hail of blows from their rifle butts
led us, hands held high, into the courtyard, where they ordered all four of us
face down on the ground. “Anyone who moves or lifts his head, gets a bullet
in his head!” the order rings out. A few minutes later, I hear from the sound of
feet that a large group of Sonderkommando men are brought over and made to
lie down beside us. How many could they be? I do not know, for I lie motion-
less, face pressed against the ground, in a single line with the new arrivals.
Three or four minutes later they bring a new group; these lie down behind me.
93
Nyiszli’s original 1946 text is defective here, lacking the bracketed material and thus leaving un-
clear precisely what the SS were putting into position. The missing text can be supplied from two
paragraphs below, where an otherwise inexplicable reference is made to “the two cannons” (a két
ágyút).
As we lie there motionless we continuously receive blows from rifle butts,

or kicks with boots to the head, back and waist amid a thick torrent of abuse. I
feel the warmth of the blood which pours from my head, my face, the taste of
salt, the salty taste of blood which flows over my lips. I only feel the first few
blows. My head buzzes and spins. I do not think of anything. My sense organs
begin to renounce their duties. I feel as if I am dissolving into the indifference
of annihilation.
For twenty or thirty minutes we lie there like that and wait for the bullet
from the gun of the SS soldier standing behind us. I knew that in this situation
they would shoot us in the head. That is the quickest and easiest kind of death.
I should know. A professional matter! I can almost see my brains splattering
under the hydraulic pressure of the bullet penetrating from point blank and my
skull falling apart into a thousand pieces.
I hear the roar of an automobile. It can only be Dr. Mengele arriving! The
men of the political SS have been waiting for him. I cannot look up, but I rec-
ognize his voice. He speaks with the SS commander standing before our front
line. Suddenly I hear a loud shout. An SS yells at us: “Doctors stand up!” We
obey the order. All four of us stand up. Standing at attention we wait for what
is to happen next. Dr. Mengele motions me over to him. My face and shirt are
bloody, my clothes are muddy; I stand thus before him. Next to him stand
three SS officers, heads of the political SS. Dr. Mengele asks what we have
been up to. “Nothing,” I reply. “We were merely executing the Hauptsturm-
führer’s orders. We were dissecting the Russian officer’s corpse when the
trouble occurred. Half the autopsy was left to do at the time, and the protocol
is in the typewriter. It is possible to check that! We stayed at our posts the en-
tire time, they found us there.” The SS commander confirms all this. Dr.
Mengele looks at me and says: “Go, clean yourself up and get back to work!”
I turn on my heels, my three companions follow as well. We head for the
crematorium door. We have taken scarcely twenty steps when bursts of rapid
gunfire ring out behind our backs. The Sonderkommando lies dead on the
bloody pavement stones [kövezeten].
I did not turn around but rather hastening my pace I went to my room.
With trembling hands I tried to roll a cigarette. I tore three papers before I
succeeded. I lit up and, drawing a deep puff of smoke, staggered to my bed
and lay down. Only now did I begin to feel, in my head and in all the parts of
my body, the pain caused by the blows and kicks that I had endured.
All these many things had happened today, and yet it was only three in the
afternoon. My salvation caused me neither joy nor relief. I realize that I have
only gained a reprieve. I know Dr. Mengele and the SS mentality. I am con-
scious of the importance of my sphere of work and I know as well that I am ir-
replaceable. Apart from me, there is no forensic pathologist in the K.Z. who
could answer to the local requirements. Even if there were some such person,
he would be careful not to reveal his professional abilities and thus fall into
Dr. Mengele’s clutches, ending his life four months later as a Sonderkomman-
do.
When my utterly jangled nerves had calmed a little, I got up from my bed
and went out to look around. I wanted to know what had really happened this
afternoon. Was there in fact a traitor among us and had the SS prevented the
planned insurrection with the destruction of the Sonderkommando? Even by
looking they could not have found a better occasion and pretext for the liqui-
dation of the Kommando. On another theory, the four-month term simply ex-
pired today. The political SS had received an order for the executions! They
had gone into action to carry it out, but the twelfth Sonderkommando had not
complied with the order that they should line up in the courtyard, as if they
were being called together for the purpose of counting or issuing orders, but in
reality simply so they could be shot. Our Sonderkommando, in the awareness
of all this, chose armed resistance.
In the cremation hall, stripped naked, my dead comrades lie in long lines
before the furnaces. One after another I recognize the bodies of my comrades
who broke out of Crematorium I. The collected corpses were brought in on
hand carts from the guard-chain line where they had fallen. Lying here also
are those comrades who were executed in the courtyard after my three com-
panions and I were removed from their lines. These were brought from Crem-
atoria II, III and IV to Crematorium I after the crushing of the uprising, to be
done away with here and cremated together with the others. Today the furnac-
es are lit only here, and only thirty hastily assembled new Sonderkommando
members are available.
I am standing beside an SS NCO who is recording the numbers from the
arms of the corpses, turned with their faces upward. I do not ask him, he tells
me of his own initiative that twelve men are missing from the Sonderkomman-
do; the others, with the exception of seven men, are dead. Of the seven men,
four are us, the three doctors of the dissection and hall and the laboratory as-
sistant. Also still alive are the operator engineer for the dynamos [a dynamók]
and the fans, a chief stoker, and a Pipel,94 that is, an errand boy in the personal
service of the SS who keeps their clothes, boots and cutlery in order and be-
sides this also performs telephone duty. Twelve succeeded in escaping.
From the Pipel I learned in detail the events of the day today. There was no
hint of betrayal. Seventy members of the political SS arrived by truck [tehe-
rautón] at Crematorium III at half-past one in the afternoon. Their commander
ordered the Kommando to fall in, but no one among them moved. They
guessed what would follow. The SS officer decided that it would be easier to
achieve the goal by initiating a diversionary action; they are masters in the art
of lies. To that end, he stood himself in the middle of the courtyard and deliv-
94
In German in the original, correctly Piepel. The word is a dialectical and slang form which means
“young boy” or, euphemistically, “penis.”
ered a speech with all the primitivity and concision of the SS: “Men, since you
have worked sufficiently here, by superior orders you will be going in a
transport to a labor camp. There you will have good clothes, plenty of grub
and easy work. So anyone whose tattoo number I read out should step forward
from among you and fall in line.” He began reading. There are one hundred
Hungarian Sonderkommando men in Crematorium III; he reads them out first.
These are the youngest residents of the K.Z.; they line up unresistingly. Their
fear is greater than their courage. An SS platoon immediately leads them away
out of the courtyard. They lock them all in Barracks number 13 of Camp “D.”
Meanwhile at Crematorium III the reading of the tattoo numbers went on.
It became the turn for those of Greek nationality. These do not fall into line so
readily when the SS officer shouts out their numbers. The Polish group comes
next. Murmurs and impetuous, heckling shouts are heard from the crowd. The
SS shouts out a number. Nobody moves! As he looks around expectantly, a
mineral water bottle falls in front of his feet. A terrible explosion follows.
Seven SS lie in their own blood, wounded or dead, the commander among
them. The bottle was filled with ecrasite. The Poles had thrown it. The SS
open fire murderously on the mutineers. The latter race into the crematorium.
From there they throw bottles of ecrasite into the courtyard. A group of SS
mow down all the Greeks still standing in line in the courtyard with their ma-
chine pistols. A few among them tried to escape. They too were shot down by
the gates.
Shooting continuously, the SS advance toward the crematorium entrance. It
is a difficult task, for the Poles put up stiff resistance. One after another the
mineral water bottles fall into the courtyard from the building’s windows
[ablakaiból] and their powerful explosions keep the entrance to the building
clear, until an explosion surpassing all others so far cuts to the ground those
SS soldiers who have gotten near by now. The crematorium’s enormous roof
structure blows open and hundreds of rafters fly up into the sky among smoke
and flames. Four steel barrels full of gasoline had exploded and turned the
great building into a pile of ruins burying the Sonderkommando beneath itself.
A few among the survivors still resisted, but the machine guns of the SS
mowed them down. The others, those who were able to walk despite their
wounds, came out the door with their hands held up, but the hail of bullets
made an end of them too. They knew what was waiting for them, but fire was
raging inside the building and they chose the easier death instead. The one
hundred Hungarian Sonderkommando men taken to Camp “D” were also
brought back and shot without exception.
Thus the uprising began in Crematorium III. In Crematorium I, work went
on quietly until Crematorium III blew into the air. At the sound of the explo-
sion the tension reaches its peak in the already strained atmosphere of waiting.
For a few moments nobody knew what had happened. The stokers leave the
furnaces and, huddling in a group at one end of the hall, they discuss the pos-
sibilities. They only have a few moments’ time for this, for one of the SS
guards shows up among them and with a hoarse shout calls the chief stoker to
account, for his men are not working and have left the furnaces [kazánokat] to
themselves. The chief stoker replied to him with something which must not
have been a satisfactory explanation to him for the cessation of work. With his
heavy cane – for all the SS guards have one, and use it for the coercion of the
Sonderkommando – he struck him in the face with all his might, naturally with
the curved end. Another might perhaps have collapsed dead with a shattered
skull from such a blow; the chief stoker, the toughest man of the Sonderkom-
mando, merely staggered. Blood poured down his face. From the leg of a boot
he draws forth a long, sharp knife and thrusts it into the SS NCO’s chest. The
latter would have collapsed, but two other stokers are already on him. The
door of the first furnace [az első kazán ajtaja] opens and they throw him head
first into the fire. All this happened in an instant, but another SS guard hurry-
ing into view of the group from the far end of the hall had managed to catch
sight of the booted feet of the SS man. At a run he makes straight for the first
furnace [az első kemencéhez] to open its door. He wants to see who has been
thrown into the furnace [a kazánba] fully clothed and wearing boots. It can
only be an SS soldier or a Sonderkommando man! He never learned which of
the two it was. Leaping forward, a Sonderkommando man stabbed him in the
chest and with the help of two others shoved him into the furnace [a kazánba]
beside his comrade [társa mellé].
Within moments, machine pistols and grenades and blasting boxes were in
all hands. Heavy gunfire and explosions sound from every side of the great
cremation hall. At one end stand the SS guards, at the other, the Sonderkom-
mando men. A hand grenade falls among the SS. This signifies the incapacita-
tion or death of seven of them. There are wounded and dead on the Sonder-
kommando’s side as well. This makes their attacks even fiercer. A few more
men fall among the SS; the others, there might have been twenty or so, find it
best to withdraw from the building. They do not stop until the crematorium
gate. There they link up with the group of SS brought in meanwhile from the
outside that is just now moving into action.
The rest we already know. Seven of us remain in the crematorium! The
twelve are also brought back during the night. During the breakout they suc-
ceeded in getting beyond the Vistula, but they fell into the hands of a large
group of SS. Completely exhausted, they had hidden in a Polish house they
thought was safe. Their host had notified an SS detachment prowling nearby;
the latter fell upon them by surprise and took all twelve prisoners.
I was already lying in my bed and was trying to sleep after an eventful day.
Suddenly the clatter of multiple machine pistols rouses me from my slumber.
After the sound of the shots, heavy steps approach along the corridor
[folyosón]. My door flies open and two SS stagger through it. Both have
bloody faces. The twelve men of ours who were brought back, when they ar-
rived at the crematorium courtyard with their escort, attacked the latter with
their fists in order to grab their weapons. Thence the injuries to the SS men’s
faces. Naturally they immediately shot them all to death, without exception.
They charge me with the care and bandaging of their wounds. I comply with
their orders.
The loss of the twelve comrades completely crushes me. At the cost of so
many lives not a single messenger has succeeded in getting away from this
cursed place in order to tell of what is happening here.
As I later ascertained, however, news of the rebellion did get out. Some
K.Z. prisoners who were working together with civilian laborers passed it
along. There was someone among the SS as well who talked. This was a great
event! Unique in the history of the K.Z.’s! Eight hundred and fifty-three pris-
oners had died. Seventy SS soldiers were killed. Among them were an Ober-
sturmführer, seventeen Oberscharführer and Scharführer, and fifty-two
Sturmmann,95 that is, simple privates. Crematorium III had burned to ashes
and Crematorium IV was put out of operation as a result of the destruction of
its machinery.
Chapter XXX
I wake up tired after a very restless night. I am in a state of severe nervous ex-
citement. The muted chatter of my roommates, even the clicking of their shoes
irritates me.
In a foul mood, I head to the dissection hall with my companions. We pass
through the cremation hall. The concrete floor in front of the furnaces
[kazánok] is clean. Our comrades were all cremated while it was still the mid-
dle hours of the night. The furnaces are already in the process of cooling; they
give off only a tepid warmth. The thirty new Sonderkommando men, all of
them horrified by the bloody tragedy of their first day spent in the crematori-
um, sit in frozen silence or lie in the beds of their dead comrades.
This state of affairs lasts only a few days. Soon signs of life, smaller and
greater, will appear even in them. The appetite for a tasty morsel. Smoking re-
lieves the pressure weighing on them too. In brandy, however, they discover
the most effective, most blessed of remedies. For a few hours it cures a man of
crematorium disease. It causes one to forget the past, and allows one to think
of neither present nor the still-more-dreadful future. They have put on that
which they had been so in want of until now in the barracks of the K.Z.: good
clothes. They can practice cleanliness as much as they like as well. Here there
is water and a bath, there is soap, and above all there are towels. I view them
95
Sic, all ranks in German in the original. Hungarian does not mark plurals on nouns following a
number and so the singular forms are not out of place. The correct plurals would be
(Ober)scharführer (no change) and Sturmmänner.
as an old army-camp resident views new recruits. They’ll soon get used to
everything!
For lack of other business in the cremation hall, ut aliquid videatur – that
is, so something may be seen – I give work to my men. I make them wipe the
dust off the jars of museum specimens. I make them put the instruments in or-
der, and I also have them patch together the screen over the window which
was ripped by the bullets of yesterday’s battle. I seat myself at my work table
and make lists in my head, stuck all over as it is with bandages, of the com-
plaints and requests to be made to Dr. Mengele.
I will explain to him that the crematorium does not have even a single
room suitable as a dissection hall, for the screams of the thousands going to
their deaths reach everywhere, piercing to the very marrow of one’s bones. Ei-
ther death by gas, or a shot to the back of the neck awaits them. I cannot con-
centrate on my research work, for starting from the day of my arrival here I
have been conscious of the fate of the eleven Sonderkommandos brought here,
and every hour and minute of the day for four months I have awaited the cul-
mination of the fate of my own Kommando, the twelfth. I will also ask him to
be reasonable and not require too precise a job from me, for just yesterday,
October 6, 1944, he commanded that I should dissect the corpse of a Russian
army officer and write up the autopsy protocol. Crematorium III blows into
the air before my eyes [szemem előtt], an SS battalion attacks. Cannons and
bloodhounds are deployed. Hand grenades explode. SS soldiers with fixed
bayonets force their way into this hall of science that is directed by me. Amid
constant blows they lead us out to the courtyard; there they make us lie in the
mud, and for a few moments I am transformed from a medical examiner into a
subject for execution. It is true that he, Dr. Mengele, took me out of the line of
those sentenced to death, but I have only returned to the death house again for
a new, four-month term. I will also ask him to consider the absurdity of the
situation which arose last night. I provided medical assistance to two SS
NCOs who just yesterday ordered me to the ground, kicked me repeatedly, hit
me with the butts of their rifles wherever they could. With their guns pointed
at my head, they were merely waiting for the signal to shoot their murderous
bullets into me.
These are the complaints and concerns which I intend to present to my
boss. My hope, in turn, is that he will transfer us, the four-member dissection-
hall Kommando, along with the dissection hall itself, to a suitable location in
the K.Z.
By the time I have done formulating what I want to say, Dr. Mengele is al-
ready opening the door. As per regulations we stand to attention, and as first
in rank I announce: “Captain! Three doctors and one laboratory assistant at
work at their jobs!”
His gaze glides over me and comes to a halt on my head, stuck all over
with adhesive bandages. “What happened to you?” he asks in a half-
sympathetic, half-amused voice. From the question I gather that he does not
want to remember the events of yesterday afternoon. I do not even answer it. I
only say what little remains from my pile of complaints, now melted away in-
to mist: “Captain! This environment is not suitable for the performance of sci-
entific research work. Might the relocation of the dissection hall not be practi-
cable?” He looks at me. His face hardens. “Perhaps you have some sentiments
to share?” he asks with icy brevity.
I reproach myself for having so forgotten the prudence which I have adopt-
ed thus far and for having criticized this environment where my addle-brained,
research-obsessed boss feels most at home.
The blazing flames of the pyres send their light here [Idevilágít a máglyák
lobogó tüze]. The smoke from the chimneys of the four crematoria is perva-
sive here [Itt terjeng négy krematórium kéményeinek füstje]. The air is heavy
with the smell of burning human flesh and singed hair. The screams of those
going to their deaths and the explosive report of shots to the back of the neck
make the building’s walls tremble. He returns here after every selection and
bloody fireworks display.
He spends all his free time here in this atmosphere of horrors, and with a
silent fury he makes me open the corpses of hundreds of innocents sent to
their deaths. Bacteria propagates itself in the electric incubator on a growth
medium prepared from fresh human flesh. He sits before the microscope for
hours at a time and seeks after the cause of phenomena such as none will ever
decipher, the cause of multiple births.
Today, however, he appears tired. He has come from the Jews’ ramp where
he stood for hours in the pouring rain and selected the inhabitants of the Riga
ghetto who have been brought here [a Riga-i ghettó idehurcolt lakóit]. But this
was no selection, for all went to the left. The two functioning crematoria and
the huge ditches of the pyres [a máglyak óriási árkai] are filled with them.
Due to demand, the Sonderkommando stands at four hundred and sixty men.
He sits at the laboratory work table in his wet coat. He does not even take
his hat off, though drops of rain water still fall from its visor. He does not
even notice perhaps.
“Captain!” I say. “Allow me to take your coat and hat into the furnace
room [kazánterembe]. They will be dry in five minutes.”
“Leave it,” he replies. “The water can only go as far as my skin.”
He asks for the autopsy protocol for the Russian army officer who was
shot. I turn it over. He takes it in his hands, reads a few lines from it and gives
it back. “I’m very tired. You read it!” Surprised, I take the protocol and start
in with the reading of it. I only get as far as four or five lines. He interrupts.
“Leave it, it’s not necessary,” he says and stares at the window with a gaze
that looks into infinity but sees nothing.
What can have happened to this man? Perhaps he has had his full of the
surfeit of horrors? Has he received bad news, from which he has realized that
there’s no sense in going on? I also consider it possible that the exertions of
the last months have worn him out.
In our life together he has never given an opportunity for a personal con-
versation. Now, however, he seems so broken down that I take courage and
ask:
“Captain! How long will the exterminations go on?”
He looks at me and replies:
“Mein Freund! Es geht immer weiter, immer weiter!”96
My friend! It goes ever on, ever on!
I sense a quiet resignation in his words.
He gets up from his seat and leaves the laboratory. With his briefcase in
my hands, I accompany him to his car.
“In the next few days you will have a part in some interesting work,” he
says and gets into his car.
With a cold shiver I realize that interesting work means the death of anoth-
er group of twins.
Chapter XXXI
The crematoria are in a state of readiness. The men of the Sonderkommando
replace the refractory linings [samottbéléseket] in the furnaces’ fire boxes [a
kemencék tűzszekrényeiben]. They paint the heavy iron doors of the furnaces
[kazánok] and oil their hinges. The dynamo and fans [a dynamók és ventil-
látorok] run all day. Experts check their functioning. The arrival of the Litz-
mannstadt ghetto [a liztmannstadt-i ghettó] has been announced. One should
know about this ghetto that the Germans established it in the winter of 1939.
The number of its inhabitants at the beginning was 500,000 souls. The ghet-
to’s inhabitants worked in enormous war factories. In payment for their work
they received ghetto marks, but they could exchange this currency only for ex-
tremely narrowly defined rations. It follows of itself that the disproportion be-
tween superhuman work performance and nutrition brought about their de-
struction en masse. Frequent epidemics also decimated them. In this way, the
500,000 souls melted away to 70,000 by the autumn of 1944.
Now the end has come for these as well. Each day [napi] they arrive at the
Jews’ ramp of K.Z. Auschwitz in groups of ten thousand [tízezres csoportok-
ban]. The selection sent ninety-five percent to the left, five percent to the
right. Cast out, bowed down by the weight of the tragedy of their accursed
race, tortured by the spirit-killing desolation of five years of life in the ghetto,
aged by decades by the slave labor imposed upon them, they have exhausted
their capacity to experience good or evil. They pass through the crematorium
96
gates with indifference, though it is no secret to them that they have arrived at
the last stage on the journey of their fate.
I go down to the undressing room. Their clothing and shoes lie scattered
about on the concrete floor. One could hardly hang these rags and these scraps
of wood used as shoes up on hooks. The cloakroom numbers do not interest
them. They drop their luggage where they stand. The Sonderkommando men
working on the sorting open a few of the packages and show them to me. A
flatbread made of corn flour, water and a bit of linseed oil, and one or two ki-
los of oatmeal flour were all their provisions for the journey.
During the arrival of one of their transports, it happened that Dr. Mengele
spotted a hunchbacked man of about fifty years of age among those lined up
for selection. The cripple was not alone. Beside him stood a handsome-faced,
tall youth of fifteen or sixteen years of age whose right leg was deformed, and
corrected with a frame made of steel plates and a thick-soled orthopedic shoe.
They were father and son.
Dr. Mengele believed he had found a textbook example of his theory of the
degeneracy of the Jewish race in the physical defects of the hunchbacked fa-
ther and the cripple-legged son. He immediately takes them out of the line. He
motions an SS NCO over to him. He tears two pages out of his notebook, jots
something down on them, and has the two unfortunates accompanied to
Crematorium I by the SS soldier.
The time is getting on to twelve noon. Crematorium I is not in operation
today. I am not busy at the moment. I am passing time in my room. The SS
soldier doing day duty comes to find me there. He summons me to the gate.
Standing there already are the father with his son, with the SS escort behind
them. I receive one of the written messages, which is addressed to me. It says
in it: “Dissection hall, Krema I. – The Number 197 will examine both clinical-
ly. Take precise measurements of father and son. Prepare clinical examination
pages precisely containing within themselves all findings, particularly with
regard to causes for the emergence of the observed deformities.”
The other note is addressed to Oberscharführer Mussfeld. Even without
reading it I know what is in it. I hand it to a Sonderkommando man; he will
deliver it to him.
Father and son, moldering images of the terrible years in the Litzmannstadt
ghetto, look at me with an inquiring gaze, with a sense of anxiety, with lips
mutely expressive of foreboding. I pass with them across the sunny courtyard.
With a few reassuring words I escort them into the autopsy hall. Fortunately
no corpse is lying on the dissecting table; that would have been a terrible sight
for them!
97
Sic: “A No. I.…” By this Mengele presumably is addressing Nyiszli as the “Number 1” of the dis-
section-hall staff.
Out of respect I do not examine them here, in this pervasively foul-

smelling, gloomy room, but rather in the bright, warm laboratory. The father,
as I learn from his account, was an eminent textiles wholesaler in Litz-
mannstadt who during the years of peace had often sought out distinguished
Viennese professors of medicine for the treatment of his son.
First I examine the father with exhaustive thoroughness. The curvature of
his spine is the consequence of a late-developing rachitis, or rickets. Even up-
on the closest examination I do not otherwise observe symptoms of any dis-
ease in him.
I reassure him as well that from here he will certainly be going to some la-
bor camp or other.
Before I conduct his examination I also chat with the son – pleasant faced,
intelligent seeming, but psychologically completely shattered. Trembling with
fear, he recounts in a monotone voice the innumerable horrid, painful and
tragic events of five years of life in the ghetto. At ten years of age he had gone
behind the ghetto wire with his parents. His mother, a frail-bodied, tender-
hearted woman did not long endure the ordeals that descended upon them. She
fell into a state of melancholy and depression. For weeks she hardly took any
nourishment for herself so that more of the already tightly rationed, unpalata-
ble food should go to her husband and son. This true Jewish wife and Jewish
mother, who loved her child to the point of madness, died a martyr in the first
year of their ghettoization. Thus bereaved, the widowed husband and mother-
less child lived the tragic life of the ghetto.
Now they are in Crematorium I. What a horrible drama of our Jewish ex-
istence that I, a Jewish doctor, must examine them with precise clinical meth-
ods before they go to their deaths, and then dissect their still-warm bodies. I
feel this horrible irony of our Jewish destiny with such passion that my nerves,
in my impotence, are strained almost to the point of madness.
By whose will has this series of horrors descended upon our unfortunate
people? Perhaps by God’s! He has long since hidden himself in shame, then,
for even He did not will this much.
I gather up every last little bit of my disintegrating energy. I examine the
boy too. On his right foot I observe a congenital defect involving the incom-
plete development of certain joints. The scientific name of this deformity is
hypomelia. As I observe, brilliantly gifted hands have performed repeated op-
erations on it, in consequence of which his leg has become shortened, but with
bandaging and an orthopedic shoe he is fully capable of walking. I did not ob-
serve any other deformities on his body.
I ask them whether they want anything to eat. They are very hungry, they
say. I tell one of the Sonderkommando to bring food for them. They immedi-
ately receive a plentiful portion of meat stew with macaroni. Only the Sonder-
kommando has such food. They immediately start in on it and greedily con-
sume the fine food which they have not tasted for so long. They do not know,
though I do, that they are consuming their death-house meal, their “last sup-
per” [„utolsó vacsorát”].
Scarcely half an hour later Oberscharführer Mussfeld and four Sonderkom-
mando men appear. They lead the two men into the furnace room [kazánter-
embe]; there they make them remove their clothes and the Oberscharführer’s
gun fires twice. Father and son lie dead on the bloody concrete. Oberscharfüh-
rer Mussfeld has carried out Dr. Mengele’s order.
Now it is my turn again. The two corpses are brought into the dissection
hall. I feel such nausea at the horror of it that I entrust performance of the au-
topsies to my companions; I write the protocol. The autopsies do not even fur-
nish any additional data to the store which I have already established “in vivo”
[„élőben”]. Ordinary cases, but useful propaganda material in support of the
theory of the degeneracy of the Jewish race.
In the evening, after he has sent at least ten thousand people to their deaths
in this one day, Dr. Mengele arrives. He listens with great interest to my report
on the in vivo and autopsy data from the two physically defective victims.
“These corpses must not go for cremation [elégetésre],” he says. “They
will be prepared and the skeletons will go to the anthropological museum in
Berlin.”
He asks me what methods I know for the perfect cleaning of skeletons. “I
know two methods,” I reply. “One is the dissolving method, which consists of
placing the corpse in a calcium chloride solution; within two weeks this will
burn away all soft parts. After that the bones go into a gasoline bath, which
dissolves the grease from them, thereby leaving them dry, odorless and snow-
white in color. The second method, the cooking method, is shorter. It consists
of simply cooking the body in water until the fleshy parts are easily and
smoothly removable from the bones. Afterwards, here too we employ a gaso-
line bath for the degreasing and bleaching of the bones.”
Dr. Mengele orders the employment of the shorter method, cooking.
Orders in the K.Z. tend to be quite short. Here they do not say how, they do
not say where the K.Z. prisoner is to procure the tools necessary for the execu-
tion of the order. It has to be carried out! I am in just such a bind myself. I
have to cook two corpses. In what shall I cook them, and where? I turn to
Oberscharführer Mussfeld, he will be of assistance to me! I tell him that I
have to cook two corpses but I do not have any suitable vessels. Even he lis-
tens to my relation of events with horror. He reflects a little, and two tinplate
barrels which are lying unused in a storeroom [egy raktárheyiségben] come to
his mind.
He puts these at my disposal and recommends that I have stoves [tűzhelye-
ket] built from bricks in the courtyard. I do so. The stoves are prepared, the
tinplate barrels are placed over them with their terrible contents and the cook-
ing begins. Two Sonderkommando men are assigned as wood carriers and
stokers. Five hours later, after repeated tests, I ascertain that the soft parts sep-
arate from the bones smoothly. I put a stop to the fires, but the barrels will re-
main in their places until cooled.
In the absence of better occupation, I sit down in a small grove near the
barrels and read. A pleasant silence surrounds me. Today nothing is in opera-
tion. Four stonemason prisoners brought here from Auschwitz I are repairing
the crematorium’s chimney [a krematórium kéményét javítja].
It is getting on toward evening. The barrels should be cooled, and I am just
about to get up from my resting place for the emptying of them when one of
my men comes running up from among the barrels’ guards and attendants and,
quite beside himself, shouts: “Doctor! The Poles are eating the flesh from the
barrels!” I leap quickly from my seat and rush over. Four unfamiliar prisoners
in striped clothing are standing, immobilized, around the barrels. They are the
Polish stonemasons who, having completed their work, are waiting for their
guards to take them back to their quarters in Auschwitz I. Half-starved men,
they were searching about in the courtyard for something to eat and thus came
across the barrels, left unguarded for a few minutes. They believed that the
meat cooking in the big barrels was for the Sonderkommando. They sniffed,
took out a few large pieces of skinless flesh, cut some pieces from it with their
knives and began greedily to eat, but not for long, for the two stokers showed
up and spotted them. They were almost paralyzed with terror when they
learned what sort of flesh they had eaten.
After the gasoline bath, the dissection hall assistant puts the bones together
with great expertise. They lay spread out on the laboratory table, where I ex-
amined them alive one day ago.
Dr. Mengele was very satisfied. He brought several highly ranked medical
colleagues along with him for the examination of the skeletons. They fiddled
self-importantly with a few pieces. They tossed around scientific expressions.
They behaved as if the deformities in the skeletons of the two victims were
unparalleled medical findings. What they are engaged in is Pseudowissen-
schaft,98 pseudoscience. There is no extraordinary anomaly here. What there is
can be seen in hundreds of thousands of people in every part of the world. It is
a frequent observation even in a medical practice in contact with a quite small
cross-section of the public. Still, it is magnificently useful for propaganda
purposes, for by its very nature pseudoscience99 does not shrink from blatant
lies dressed up in scientific garb. Those in turn who view the propaganda ma-
terial and read the text normally are not possessed of critical spirit, but rather
take everything as it is served up to them.
The two skeletons go into long, sturdy paper bags, and in this manner trav-
el to Berlin with the accompanying data. Onto this shipment also went the
98
99
The subject here is not explicitly expressed in the original and must be supplied from context. It
might also be “propaganda” or even (with a change of pronouns in the preceding clause in transla-
tion, i.e., “by his very nature”) “Dr. Mengele.”
“Urgent, important war shipment” stamp.100 I was relieved when they were out
of my sight. They had caused me extremely bitter hours, both in their lives
and in their deaths.
A week had passed [elmult egy hét]; the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt
ghetto has ended. The late October sunshine gives way to cold autumn rain.
Fog and gloom cover the barracks of the K.Z. My past slowly becomes foggy
and my future is dark. The rain pouring down for days on end, the damp cold
that penetrates to the bone, the silence all only increase the bitterness that has
accumulated inside me. Wherever I go, wherever I look, everywhere there is
only electrified wire, reminder of the vanity of all hope.
Three days following the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt ghetto the head
Kapo of the Sonderkommando brings a woman, soaked to her skin, and two
dripping, shivering children in from the crematorium courtyard. Guessing the
worst, they had sneaked away from the last transport marching in to die, and
hidden behind the large pile of firewood standing in the crematorium court-
yard [a krematórium udvarán álló nagy tűzifarakás mögött]. Before their eyes,
their transport went below the ground,101 and they were able to observe that no
one came back out from there. Frozen in terror, they waited for some chance
that could be of help to them, but nothing occurred. They had waited like that
for three days in the cold wind and pouring rain, without food, soaked to the
skin in ragged clothes, until the head Kapo came across them half unconscious
while doing his rounds. There was nothing he could do; he brought them be-
fore Oberscharführer Mussfeld. The woman, bone thin, around thirty years of
age but looking more like fifty, fell to her knees before the Ober with a last
exertion of strength, clasped his boots and with heart-rending despair pleaded
for the lives of her two children, aged 10 and 12 years, as well as for her own.
She said that she had worked for the German army for five years in a clothes
factory in the ghetto. She still wants to work after this. Let them spare their
lives. There was no helping it! They had to die! And indeed they died, but
time has managed to wear down even the Ober; he sent another in his place
for the completion of the murderous task.
Chapter XXXII
We forgot even this bloody episode, for we had to forget if we did not want to
go mad from the horrors we lived through and the desperation of our dark fu-
ture. In this, the forgetful hours of Luminal stupor helped a great deal. I often
think of the past as if I had lived through my life before the K.Z. in a dream.
To forget everything, that alone is my goal, and to think of nothing.
100
See Chapter VIII, where the stamp is introduced as saying “Urgent, important war material”
(„Sürgős, hadi fontosságú anyag”) rather than “shipment” (küldemény), as here.
101
That is, into the semi-underground undressing room.
It is November 1, 1944, the Day of the Dead [halottak napja].102 The snow
is falling thickly in large flakes. It is scarcely possible to see as far as the
guard towers, for everything is confounded in the vast whiteness. Only the
crows, gaunt from hunger, take to their wings when the booming north wind
shakes the wire of the fences.
Though the weather is unsuitable for it, I go for a short walk in the evening
twilight, and the cold wind refreshes and soothes my jangled nerves. I walk
around the courtyard several times; my path leads me before the entrance
down into the gas chamber. I stop there for a few moments. It occurs to me
that today is the day of the dead! [Eszembe jut, ma halottak napja van!] All
around a ghastly silence lies over everything. The cold stones of the concrete
stairs disappear in the darkness of the entrance down into the gas chamber.
Four million [négymillió] innocent people said farewell to their lives here with
a last, painful glance, that they might then descend into their unmourned tomb.
I stand here alone, on the last step of their lives. To me thus falls the sad duty
to commemorate [emlékezzek] them with profound sympathy in place of rela-
tives living all over the world.
I leave this place and return to my room. When I open the door I am sur-
prised to see that the usual bright electric lamp is not on; in its place flickering
candlelight gives faint illumination to the room. For a moment I suspect an
electrical fault. My colleague, the assistant lecturer from Szombathely, is sit-
ting at the table holding his head propped in his hands, staring into the flame
of the candle standing before him. He does not even notice my entrance. The
flickering flame of the candle illuminates his face. He appears older than his
years. I place my hand on his shoulder and, attuning myself to his mood, I
quietly ask: “Dénes, for whom have you lit a commemorative candle [em-
lékgyertyát] in this place?” I receive a confused reply. He speaks of his father-
in-law, his mother-in-law, they have been dead for fifteen years. Of his wife
and child, who were lost here in Crematorium I – there are eyewitnesses to
this in the Sonderkommando – he makes no mention. I immediately recognize
the symptoms of melancholic depression and retrograde amnesia, that is, a de-
ficiency in recollection.
I embrace him, take him to his bed and make him lie down. “My poor
friend! You, a frail-bodied, soft-spoken, fine-souled, deeply learned doctor
who, in place of the care of the sick, have fallen into the service of death and
become a subject of its empire. For long months you have been witness to
tragedies and horrors such as no human mind could comprehend and no per-
son living would believe. It is just as well that your nerves have renounced
102
Nyiszli presumably intends to refer here to the traditional Christian celebration of All Souls’ Day
(in remembrance of the dead), though technically this falls on the second of November; it is the
related All Saints’ Day (in honor specifically of the saints of the church) which falls on the first.
their duties and that a beneficent veil of fog clouds over your brain. At least
you will not feel the things that are still to come.”
Chapter XXXIII
After several days of silence, the usual din once again dominates the area of
the crematoria. The motors of the big fans [a nagy ventillátorok motorjai]
drone, the fires in the furnaces are revived [élesztik a kazánot tüzét]. The arri-
val of the Theresienstadt ghetto has been announced.
During the period of the Czechoslovak Republic, Theresienstadt was spe-
cifically a garrison town. The Germans terminated the garrison’s status, re-
moved the civilian population and established a model ghetto in the town. Its
inhabitants were Jews deported from the territory of Czechoslovakia, Austria
and Holland. Their number approached seventy thousand. Until now they
lived under fairly good conditions. They were able to freely practice their pro-
fessions. They received mail and Red Cross aid packages. Red Cross delegates
from neutral states visited the town several times and on each occasion report-
ed favorably on conditions there. The Germans had achieved their goal with
the establishment of the model ghetto, for the reports neutralized and classi-
fied as malicious slanders the rumors which were circulating about the horrors
of the K.Z.’s and the crematoria.
The Third Reich, on the eve of its collapse, no longer cares about world
public opinion; it throws off its mask of seeming humanity. They begin the to-
tal extermination of the Jews still alive in their hands.
And so the model ghetto of Theresienstadt’s turn for extermination has ar-
rived.
REICH SS COMMISARIAT [kormánybiztosság]
DEPLOYMENT AND ALLOCATION OF COMPULSORY LABORERS
CONSCRIPTION NOTICE
The Jew X. Y. of the Reichsprotektorat103 is hereby notified that by order
of the above-named authorities he has been assigned to total labor service [to-
tális munkaszolgálatra].104 The conscript is required to present any tools used
in the practice of his profession, his instruments, his winter clothes, bedding
and provisions for one week to the delegates of the above-named authorities
prior to start of group departures. The date of departure will be communicated
by posted notices.
Theresienstadt… date.
103
Short for Reichsprotektorat Böhmen und Mähren, administrative name for the Czech portion of
the former Czechoslovakia incorporated into the Reich as a protectorate in March 1939.
104
Nyiszli does not capitalize this phrase, and it is uncertain whether he intends a proper name by it,
as previous translators have assumed (e.g., Seaver’s 1960 English translation, “Service of Obliga-
tory Labor”). (Notably, Nyiszli does not put the Hungarian definite article a before the phrase,
suggesting that he is indeed using it generically.) It does not appear, at any rate, to correspond to
the actual name of any specific program of the time.
Signature.
With these conscription notices, the work-capable men of the There-
sienstadt ghetto arrived in the Auschwitz crematoria. The deployment to total
labor was an unspeakably vile deception. It was merely a pretense for the
smooth execution of the liquidation action and for the acquisition of fine in-
struments, tools and winter clothing.
Twenty thousand [húszezer] vigorous, work-capable men died in the gas
chambers and burned to ashes in the fire of the furnaces [a kazánok tüzében].
The extermination lasted for two days [Két napig tartott a megsemmisítés].
Afterwards, a silence lasting for days lay over the crematoria.
Fourteen days later, long trains arrive one after the other at the Jews’ ramp.
Women and children descend from them. There is no selection; all go to the
left.
On the undressing room floor lie hundreds of summons notices with the
following text:
REICH SS COMMISARIAT
DEPLOYMENT AND ALLOCATION OF COMPULSORY LABORERS
SUMMONS
The above-named authorities hereby permit the wife and children of X. Y.,
Jew of the Protektorat deployed to total labor, to travel to the work location of
the aforenamed Jew and to live with him in familial union for the duration of
his compulsory labor. Appropriate accommodations are available. Winter
clothing, bedding and provisions for one week are required.
Signature.
The destruction of twenty thousand [húszezer] wives hoping to make their
husbands’ lot easier and children pining after their fathers followed in the
wake of this summons formulated with such diabolical cunning.
Chapter XXXIV
In the early morning hours of November 17, 1944, an SS NCO opens the door
to my room and confidentially informs me that by order of the Reichsführer105
the killing of people in any fashion within the grounds of the K.Z. has been
strictly prohibited. I could not give credence to this statement; I have already
been witness to so much deception. I even expressed my doubts to the bearer
of the good news, but he insisted and repeatedly stated that such an order had
arrived by radio [rádión] in the crematorium as well as at the Political SS
command. We will see then! What truth is there to it?! This too, perhaps, is
another deception.
105
Properly, Reichsführer-SS, title of Heinrich Himmler as head of the SS.
Still in the morning hours, I am convinced of the truth of the news. A train
composed of five wagons came to a halt on the rails between Crematoria I and
II. It brought five hundred exhausted, sick prisoners, with the destination “rest
camp,” before the gates of the crematoria. I am an eyewitness as a committee
of the Political SS welcomes them; the SS escort negotiates with their com-
mander. The result of the negotiation is that the five wagons turned back from
before the gates of death with their cargo and all were accommodated in the
hospital barracks of Camp F. It is the first instance since I have been in the
crematorium that a transport sent to Auschwitz with the destination “rest
camp” has lain, within an hour of arrival, not on the bloody concrete floor of
the furnace room [kazánterem] shot in the head, but rather in the care of doc-
tors, in beds in one of the barracks of the hospital camp.
Not even a full hour later another train arrives. Five hundred Slovakian
Jews – old, young, children, men, women mixed together – form the transport.
They descend from the wagons. I observe the proceedings intently. Lining up
and selection are the usual formalities on the Jews’ ramp, but what I now ob-
serve is completely unprecedented. The weary passengers descend from their
wagons; they do not leave their larger luggage behind, but rather keeping it in
their hands they all set off like that to the right, into Camp “E” of the K.Z.
Mothers push children in front of themselves in their carriages. The young as-
sist the old and the sick in their walking.
Exulting, I register the truth of the news. No doubt about it, the gates of the
crematorium will never open again before the transports of those sent to die.
A happy event which awakens hope for the prisoners of the K.Z., it is a
change which signifies the approach of death to the Sonderkommando. I have
no doubt about it; the end will come for us even sooner than the expiry of the
four-month term. A new life begins in the K.Z.’s. There is no more violent
death, but the bloody past must be hidden: the crematoria are to be demol-
ished, the pits for the pyres filled in [betömik a máglyák gödreit], and every
eyewitness and participant to the horrors must be destroyed without exception.
In full consciousness of the approaching end, we welcome the great change
with grim resignation but also with joy in our hearts.
Even if it had arrived very late, there are still a few thousand alive from
among the six million [hatmillió] souls whom Europe’s addle-brained, mad
pyromaniac, Führer of the Third Reich, hauled away from every part of Eu-
rope and reunited with each other, not one hour before their deaths, on the rail
platforms, lit by the flames of cremation pyres, of Majdanek, Treblinka,
Auschwitz, Birkenau.
As it is nearing twelve noon, driven by uneasy feelings I seek out the SS
NCO radio operator who brought us the good news early that morning in his
room. I want to know what orders have arrived during the course of the morn-
ing. Are there any directives with respect to the fate of the Sonderkommando?
Fortunately I find him alone in his room. I lay out my questions. The Sonder-
kommando, he says, will be going in a few days to do heavy labor in a secured

underground war factory somewhere near Breslau.
I did not believe a word of it. I know now that he lied, not for the purpose
of deception but rather out of consideration, for I once cured him of a serious
illness.
Chapter XXXV
My watch showed two p.m. It is after lunch and I am looking apathetically out
our window at the darkly swirling clouds of snow when a loud shout disturbs
the silence of the furnace-hall corridor [a kazánterem folyosójának]. “Alle an-
treten!”106 sounds the order. We hear it two times a day, morning and evening,
for the customary roll call, but in the afternoon it is of ominous significance.
“Alle antreten!” it sounds again, still sharper, still more impatient.
Now heavy footsteps resound at the door to our room; an SS man opens it
and shouts: “Antreten!” Here’s trouble! We head for the courtyard. We step
out into a large circle of SS guards; our comrades are already standing there.
There is not the least surprise here, not the least noise. The SS units stand si-
lently with machine pistols trained on us and wait patiently until everyone is
in the group. I look around. The young fir trees of the little grove [a kis lugas
fiatal fenyöfái] stand unmoving, covered in white. Everything is so silent!
A few minutes later we are ordered to face left and we start off between the
close-ranked lines of armed guards. Leaving the crematorium courtyard, our
escort does not lead us onto the road, but rather across the road, in the direc-
tion of Crematorium II standing opposite. Sure enough, we advance through
its courtyard. We know now that this is our final journey. We are all herded
into the crematorium’s furnace hall [kazántermébe]. Not a single SS guard
remains inside. They stand around the building, at the doors and windows,
with machine pistols ready for firing. The doors are locked; heavy iron grills
cover the windows. There is no way out here. The comrades from Crematori-
um II are here as well! A few minutes later the ones from number IV are
brought in. Four hundred and sixty men [négyszázhatvan ember] stand togeth-
er and wait for death; only the method of execution still constitutes a matter
for conjecture. Here there are specialists who know all of the death-bringing
methods of the SS. The gas chamber? That would be impossible to carry out
smoothly with the Sonderkommando! Shooting? That is a method that is
scarcely feasible here, inside!
The most likely scenario is that they will blow us up together with the
building in the interest of achieving two goals at once. That would be genuine
SS method, or perhaps we will receive a few phosphorus grenades through the
106
“[Everyone] fall in!” In German in the original.
window. Such are what the people of the Milo Ghetto [a milói ghettó népe]107
received immediately after embarkation in the wagons [közvetlenül bevagoni-
rozása után]. The train had not even set off with them and already they were
all dead. They arrived like that at the Auschwitz crematoria.
In mute silence, wordlessly – if someone says something to his companion,
he does so in a whisper – the Kommando men hunker down wherever they
have found places on the concrete of the furnace hall floor. Suddenly the si-
lence is broken: one of our comrades, a black-haired, tall, slim man wearing
glasses, about thirty years of age, leaps up from his place and in a ringing
voice, so that all can hear, begins to speak. He is a “dayan” [“dájen”],108
which is a sort of auxiliary priest [segédpapféle] in a little Jewish community
in Poland. He is an autodidact with a great store of religious and worldly
knowledge at his command. He is the ascetic of the Sonderkommando, a man
who, in order to abide by the dietary prescriptions of his faith, eats nothing
from the bountiful kitchen of the Sonderkommando [a Sonderkommandó bó
[bő] konyhájáról] but bread, margarine and onions. His assignment was to
have been stoker on a cremation furnace [égetőkemencénél], but as he is a man
of fanatic faith I have arranged with Oberscharführer Mussfeld that he should
receive an exemption from this horrible work.
I justified my request to the Ober with the observation that the man is not
employable in a job demanding great physical strength because from ritual
considerations he hardly ever eats anything, indeed is completely weakened,
and furthermore is not suitable to the place given that he only impedes the
work when bodies are being slid into the fire box [a tűzszekrénybe], as in eve-
ry instance he mumbles the prayer for the dead first. This happens several
thousands of times per day [Többezerszer törtenik ez napjában].
I had no other arguments. The Ober accepted them, and at my suggestion
the man was sent to the so-called Canada rubbish heap [úgynevezett Canada
szemétdomb]109 burning in the courtyard of Crematorium II. One should know
of this rubbish heap that they bring here all the personal effects and spoiled
food, as well as identification papers, diplomas, documents concerning mili-
tary honors, passports, marriage certificates, prayer books, phylacteries, and
107
The identity of the “Milo Ghetto” referred to here by Nyiszli is uncertain. In normal usage the
word milói occurs almost exclusively in the specific proper name “A milói Venus” (“The Venus of
Milo”), and thus refers to the Greek island of Milos (Mílosz in modern Hungarian). Naturally this
seems an unlikely candidate for the location of a ghetto full of Jews embarking on a train to
Auschwitz, but this is indeed how previous translations have generally interpreted the word. Ex-
ceptionally, Angelika Bihari’s German translation interprets it as referring to Milan (“aus dem
Mailänder Ghetto”), though this would require amending the Hungarian text to read milánói.
108
Quotation marks in the original. The word is written with a small “d” here, but capitalized in later
mentions.
109
In Auschwitz camp slang, “Canada” (or “Kanada”) was the name given to the complex of build-
ings established for the sorting and storage of prisoner effects at Birkenau. It was located in the
northwest corner of the camp, some 250 meters beyond the outer fence line of the Crematorium II
(i.e., III) compound.
Torah scrolls which the transports sent to the gas chambers brought with them
from home but which were condemned to be burned as useless items by the
SS’s evaluative criteria.
The Canada rubbish heap was a constantly burning mound [Folyton égő
dombhalom volt a Canada szemétdombja]; in this place hundreds of thousands
of photographs of married couples, elderly parents, attractive children and
beautiful girls burned in the company of thousands of prayer books. Often I
have taken in hand this or that photograph or prayer book. In almost every
single prayer book I found, written in pen, entries with the anniversary dates
of the deaths of deceased parents. Pressed flowers from all the Jewish ceme-
teries of Europe, plucked from the graves of dead beloved relatives and pious-
ly preserved. Prayer shawls and phylacteries, of fine and simple make, lay
here in a large heap [nagy halomban] waiting to be burned.
Here the “Dayan”110 worked, or rather did not work but merely watched the
fire, but he was dissatisfied even with this when I inquired how he was doing.
It did not comport with his religious ideas that he should collaborate in the
burning of prayer books, phylacteries, prayer shawls and Torah scrolls either.
I sympathized with him, but I had no means to provide him with an easier job.
In the end we were in a K.Z. and Sonderkommando men in a crematorium!
This was the “Dayan” who began to speak.
“My Jewish brothers! An inscrutable will has sent our people to its death.
Fate has reserved the cruelest duty for us, that we should assist in their de-
struction and accompany their passing to the end, to the very ashes of their
bodies, vanished in the flames. Not once did the heavens open, no showers fell
to extinguish the flames of the pyres piled with people. With Jewish resigna-
tion we must acknowledge that it had to be thus for them! It is a judgment
from God! Why? It is not for us, unworthy men, to ask!
Such a judgment has been imposed on us as well! Do not be afraid of
death! What value would life have for us if, by some extraordinary accident of
fate, we should survive? We would return home to our towns and villages.
Cold, looted homes would await us there. In every corner of the rooms the
memories of our perished families would hover before our tear-filled eyes.
Without families, without kin, we would roam about finding comfort and rest
nowhere, as mere shadows of our selves and of our pasts, wandering here and
there.”
Flames flashed in his eyes; his lean face was transfigured; perhaps he was
already in contact with the world beyond when he said these things. There was
mute silence in the hall, the only sound the hiss of matches being struck when
somebody lit a cigarette, or deep, heavy sighs expressing farewell to the living
and the dead.
110
Nyiszli writes Dajén, the Hungarian way of spelling this term. We us the English spelling here.
The heavy doors spring open. Oberscharführer Steinberg enters the hall,
accompanied by two guards with machine pistols. “Aerzte heraus!”111 he
shouts in an imperious voice. I leave the hall with my two doctor colleagues
and my laboratory assistant. Steinberg and the two SS soldiers stop with us on
the road between the two crematoria. The Ober gives me some sheets of paper
covered with numbers which he has been holding in his hands until now and
tells me to find my number and cross it out. In my hands is a list of the tattoo
numbers of Sonderkommando members. I take out my fountain pen; after a
quick search I find and cross out my number. When I have done this, he tells
me to cross out my companions’ numbers as well! This too is done. He ac-
companies us to the gate of Crematorium I. He orders us to retire to our rooms
and not to move from there! We do so.
The next morning a column made up of five trucks arrives in the cremato-
rium courtyard. They dump out corpses from themselves. The corpses of the
Sonderkommando. A newly constituted group of thirty carries the victims into
the cremation hall [égetőterembe]. They are laid out in front of the furnaces [a
kazánok előtt]. Horrible burn lesions cover their bodies. Their faces are burned
beyond recognition, their burned and tattered clothes make identification im-
possible. Even the numbers burned onto their arms112 are illegible for the most
part.
After death by gas, death at the pyres, death by chloroform injection to the
heart, the shot to the back of the neck, death in the flames of the pyres and
death by phosphorus grenade, this is the seventh type of death I have met
with.
They took my poor comrades to a nearby forest [egy közeli erdőbe] during
the night and did away with them with flamethrowers [lángszórókkal].
If the four of us survived, the underlying motive still was not the sparing of
our lives, but rather just the necessity of our survival for as long as our posi-
tions needed filling. It was neither joy nor even relief this time, merely respite,
which Dr. Mengele afforded us in leaving us alive.
Chapter XXXVI
The Sonderkommando, thirteenth in order in the bloody history of the crema-
toria, has been annihilated. After them, our days pass in an immense silence.
Finding no place for ourselves, we come and go aimlessly between the cold,
mute walls. The ringing of our footsteps is almost painful to me in the vast si-
lence! There is nothing at all to keep us occupied! The days pass idly, and the
nights in watchfulness. Four of us remained in the building [Négyen marad-
111
“Doctors out!” In German in the original.
112
Sic: “Még a karjaikra égetett szám…” Nyiszli of course is referring to the numbers made on the
prisoners’ arms by tattooing, a process which involves no burning or branding. Apparently, he has
allowed dramatic context to color his description here.
tunk az épületben]. The thirty temporary workers are not a Sonderkommando;

their quarters are in the K.Z. and they come here only every other day for the
cremation of those who have died in the camp hospital.
Mutely, sunk into ourselves, we waited for the end. It was a bad sign for us
that Oberscharführer Mussfeld, as if transformed, avoided real contact with
us. Perhaps he too sensed that he had played his part now. The bloody tragedy
was at its end and the fate of the secret-bearers would overtake him too. All
day long he sat in his room with the door closed and drank with an insatiable
thirst, so that in his alcoholic stupor he might not remember the bloody past
nor guess at the future!
One day, quite unexpectedly, Dr. Mengele arrives. He seeks us out in our
room; he guesses that we will not be in the dissection hall where, for days
now, we have had nothing to do. He tells us that, by higher orders, K.Z.
Auschwitz is to be completely liquidated – not the inhabitants in this case, he
means the institution itself. Among the crematoria, two will be demolished;
the third will remain for the time being for the cremation of the camp’s dead.
We four will be moving with the dissection-hall equipment, the museum spec-
imens and the archives to Crematorium IV. It will remain in operation. I and II
are marked for immediate destruction! Crematorium III of course burned to
ashes on the occasion of the Sonderkommando revolt of October 6.
It was at once a historic and a happy moment when, the next morning, a
detachment of prisoners deploying a thousand men [ezer embert] arrived in
the courtyard of Crematorium I and, divided into groups, began the demolition
of the building with the bloody past.
In a sense I can feel the destruction of the Third Reich as the massive, red-
brick walls fall to the ground one after another following the explosion of each
charge of dynamite. Jews built it, Jews are tearing it down! I see from their
faces that K.Z. prisoners have never worked with such zeal as they do now in
the hope of a better future!
In the dissection hall and the laboratory everything that can be moved has
been packed! We are taking only the marble slab from the dissecting table; it
will get new concrete legs in its new location. In the space of a few hours the
move is finished. We pass the night in Crematorium IV.
We install the dissecting table, set up the racks, put the prepared sections of
museum interest in their places. Thus the dissecting hall along with the labora-
tory stand ready for the performance of new assignments. For days on end
nothing happens! Here too we continue idly to sink into ourselves or to wan-
der without aim. The habit of seeking refuge in drunken stupor now complete-
ly overwhelms our SS guards. There are hardly any sober moments in their
days!
On one occasion we are sitting at our dinner when Oberscharführer Muss-
feld enters our room [szobánkba], leans unsteadily over our table and says, in
the plodding speech of drunks: “Guten Abend Jungs! Ihr werdet bald alle kre-
pieren, nachher aber kommen wir.”113 (Good evening boys! You’re all going
to croak soon, but we’re coming after!”) From the drunk man’s candid words I
learned what I had only guessed until now. Our guards will die together with
us!
I offer the Ober some hot rum tea; he drains the glasses with great pleas-
ure. He sits down at our table and, as if wanting to make up for missed oppor-
tunities, he begins to speak. He speaks of his wife, gone missing during a
bombing raid, of his son, killed on the Russian front.
“It is the end of everything!” he says. “The Russians are forty kilometers
from Auschwitz, all of Germany is wandering the roads! Everyone is fleeing
from the border areas!”
These were comforting words and, seeing the desperation of the Ober, a
spark of hope began to glow in me. Perhaps it will turn out that we survive af-
ter all!
Chapter XXXVII
Amid such doubts and hopes, the first of January 1945 arrived. New Year’s!
[Újév!] As far as the eye can see there is snow everywhere, an endless white-
ness covers the land. I take a short walk in the crematorium courtyard. The
rumble of a heavy engine interrupts the silence. Just a few moments pass, and
already K.Z. Auschwitz’s large, closed, brown-colored prisoner transport
wagon is turning in at the gate. The K.Z. folks call it “Brown Tony” [„barna
Tóni”]. A high-ranking SS officer gets down alongside the driver. I immedi-
ately recognize him and salute him as per regulations. It is Dr. Klein, SS Sur-
geon-Major, one of the more bloody-handed, dark figures of K.Z. Auschwitz.
In Barracks number 10 of the K.Z. is the prison block [A K.Z. 10-es számú
barakkjában van a börtön]. Now he is bringing 100 victims from there. “I am
bringing some New Year’s work for you,” he says to the Ober, who comes
rushing up.
The latter is so drunk that he can barely stand on his feet. He rather thor-
oughly celebrated Sylvester’s Night.114 Who knows, perhaps he was preparing
himself for the eternal night. I can see it in his face; he is not pleased that they
should trouble him with bloody work even on New Year’s morning. A hun-
dred Christian Polish prisoners are waiting here for death! They are all men in
the group. SS guards accompany them into the empty room beside the furnace
hall [a kazánterem melletti üres helyiségbe]. There they receive an order to
113
In German in the original, followed in parentheses by Nyiszli’s translation into Hungarian, as re-
produced above.
114
Szilveszter éjszakáját, Hungarian name for New Year’s Eve; from the fact that St. Sylvester’s
feast day falls on December 31. Variants of the name are common in other European languages as
well, including German.
undress immediately! Dr. Klein walks around the courtyard with the Ober. I
go into the undressing room [a vetkezőbe] and question the men there.
One of them tells me that he gave lodging to a relative in his Krakow
apartment for a night. The Gestapo declared him a harborer of partisans and
hauled him before a military tribunal. He had been awaiting the verdict in Bar-
racks 10 of the K.Z. They have sentenced him to death; that is why he is here,
but they have not told him that! He imagines that he has been brought here to
take a bath and that from here he will go on to forced labor. Another with
whom I speak wound up in the K.Z. prison block on account of profiteering.
He had bought half a kilo of butter without a ticket. That was all of his crime!
A third wound up here because he wandered into a forbidden zone. His classi-
fication was as partisan and spy! So it went on, for all one hundred! Trifling
pretexts and baseless accusations had brought them here.
There is no Sonderkommando now; the SS guards lead the victims before
the Ober’s gun.
Again I hear the roar of an automobile. “Brown Tony” is coming back. It is
bringing new victims! One hundred well-dressed women descend from the
vehicle. They too are herded into the undressing room; they too are forced to
take off their clothes. One after another they go before the Ober’s gun. They
were all Christian Polish women. They too have paid with their lives for mi-
nor offences.
The SS carries out the cremations. They ask me for rubber gloves for the
work. Once he had personally confirmed the deaths of the two hundred pris-
oners Dr. Klein departed. There is no contradiction whatsoever between the
order of November 17 which prohibited any sort of violent killing and the oc-
currence of today’s executions, for this was an action carried out pursuant to
the verdict of a military tribunal.
Chapter XXXVIII
Our days went by quietly, without incident. Dr. Mengele, so we heard, had
departed from Auschwitz. There’s a new doctor at the K.Z., which, starting
from New Year’s Day, has officially ceased to be a K.Z. and become an Ar-
beitslager,115 that is, a labor camp. Everything here is in ferment and decay!
On January 10, a newspaper comes into my hands from which I learn of
the launch of the Russian offensive. The distant rumble of heavy artillery
makes the windows of my room [szobám ablakait] tremble. The front line
draws ever nearer! The evening of January 17 I went to bed early, though I
was not tired. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. I soon fell asleep from
the pleasant warmth of the coke stove. It might have been around midnight
when I was suddenly jolted from my sleep by powerful explosions, blinding
115
lights and the clatter of machine guns. I hear a door slam, hurried steps move
away along the concrete corridor [a betonfolyosón]. I leap out of my bed; I
want to know what is happening around me. I rip open the door of our room;
the lights are on in the furnace hall [a kazánteremben]! The doors of the SS
men’s rooms [az SS.-ek szobáinak ajtói] are thrown open, sign of a sudden de-
parture.
The big oak double door of the crematorium is open as well. None of the
guards are anywhere! My glance wanders over the guard towers surrounding
the building. After eight months here, I see empty towers now for the first
time.
I run back into my room and roughly wake [felverem] my companions, and
we quickly begin to dress ourselves for the great journey! The SS have fled!
We will not remain a moment longer in this place where every hour for eight
months we have awaited certain death! We cannot wait for the Russians, for
we cannot be certain that we will not wind up in the hands of the rear guard of
the retreating SS here. If they find us here they will do away with us for sure!
We get dressed! We have excellent clothes, pullovers, winter coats and
what is most important in cold of 18 below, first-rate shoes. Each of us takes
with him a kilogram of canned meat. Medicines and cigarettes fill our pockets.
With a happy feeling of liberation, we start on our way. Direction: K.Z.
Birkenau! It is at a distance of two kilometers from the crematorium [Két kil-
ométer távolságra van a krematóriumtól]. The flames of great fires flicker on
the horizon! Probably the K.Z. is burning! We run through the furnace hall
[átrohanunk a kazánterem]; we pass beside the open door of the gold chamber
[az aranykamara nyitott ajtaja mellett megyünk el]. Riches worthy of Croesus
lie in the crates pillaged by the fleeing SS. They were only able to carry away
a tiny part of the treasures. We are running for our lives; it does not even enter
our heads that we should stop for a moment and take something with us. We
have learned that everything is fleeting and everything is endowed with only
relative value. There is only one exception to this: freedom!
We pass through the large door; no one bars our way. The sudden change
is almost unbelievable for us. Our path leads through the little Birkenau woods
[kis birkenaui erdőn], clad in white from tip to toe. We move along the way
taken by so many millions [annyi millió] to their deaths. We pass alongside
the tracks of the Jews’ ramp, buried in snow. I think of the millions of inno-
cents [millió ártatlanok] who climbed down from their trains here. Here, with
sorrowful glances, those going to the right took their leave from those going to
the left, and it was only a question of sooner or later, but all of them would
die.
The fires are indeed burning in K.Z. Birkenau! A few of the camp’s guard
buildings are burning along with the documents piled up inside them. A dark
crowd stands outside the camp gate. They are in marching columns. They are
waiting for the order to depart. I estimate the number of prisoners at about
three thousand. Without thinking we line up among them. Here in this crowd
nobody knows me. I have ceased to be one of the Sonderkommando! I am not
a known bearer of secrets! I do not have to die! I am a simple K.Z. prisoner
standing in line and I will march with the crowd. I find that to be the best solu-
tion! My companions accept it as well. Everyone is fleeing from here. They
will not haul us very far. The Russians will catch up in one or two days. The
SS surely will leave us to ourselves somewhere. For now the surest thing is to
go with them between the front lines stretching on this side and that.
The time is getting on to about one a.m. The last SS man leaves the camp.
He closes its iron gate [vaskapuját]. With a central switch located next to the
gate he turns off the camp’s lighting: Birkenau, the great cemetery of Europe-
an Jewry, is plunged into darkness. My eyes rest at length on the camp’s
barbed wire and the outlines of the barracks standing out in stark relief. I take
my leave from the graveless graves of dead millions [elhalt milliók].
A battalion of SS surrounds us and we depart! With our unknown compan-
ions we discuss events so far and matters still to come. We guess at what to-
morrow will bring us. Will the SS succeed in taking our transport onward, or
will they leave us to ourselves when the moment has arrived?
We have only gone five kilometers when the left flank of the column be-
comes the target of murderous fire. Russian advance guards had approached
our column and, thinking us troops on the march, attacked the transport. One
of their small tanks and a few machine guns joined the action. The SS order us
to get down. We all lie down in the ditch by the side of the highway. They re-
turn fire. The shooting is lively on both sides. Afterwards silence reigns! We
march onward through the barren, snow-covered Silesian landscape.
It begins to grow light. We have covered about 15 kilometers in the course
of the night. Our path now continues over trodden snow. Scattered everywhere
along the road lie eating utensils, blankets, wooden clogs fallen from feet. A
women’s transport is marching ahead of us. We can see that they are women
from the K.Z. by their abandoned belongings. A few kilometers later we see
still more! At a distance of 40-50 meters from one to the next, bloody-faced
corpses lie in the roadside ditch. The picture does not change for kilometers!
Corpses! Every fifty paces a dead body! They could not endure the march; an-
yone who dropped out of the line was simply shot in the head.
Once more I encounter a form of violent death! It appears the SS have or-
ders such that they leave no one behind alive! Not a reassuring thing to know!
The long line of bodies has an effect on everyone, we move our feet more
quickly. We are marching for our lives!
The first shots soon go off in our transport as well. The dead bodies of two
of our comrades are left behind in the ditch. They could not endure any more;
they sat down. They each received a shot to the head. So it goes from then on,
every ten minutes. Towards noon we arrive in Plesow,116 we rest for the first
time there.
We pass an hour in a football field. Whoever has something eats a bit. We
smoke a cigarette and with renewed strength we proceed along the snow-
covered road. Passing nights under the open sky, hungry and thirsty, we cov-
ered some 200 kilometers. By the time we arrived in Ratibor,117 our number
had dwindled to 2000 heads. Around 1000 people from our transport were
shot to death along the difficult way. Everyone breathes almost happily when
we see a train made up of open wagons prepared for us.
Our loading onto the wagons goes swiftly. After a night of waiting, we de-
part. I did not count how many frozen comrades we dumped from the wagons
during the course of our five-day journey! By the time we arrived at K.Z.
Mauthausen, our number had shrunk to 1500 heads. Included in the shortfall,
no doubt, were also some escapees who found a suitable moment for slipping
away.
Chapter XXXIX
K.Z. Mauthausen, the end station of our voyage, sits like an ancient castle
with its walls of dreary granite atop a conical hill that broods over the pretty
little town of the same name. This castle-like extermination camp [e várszerű
megsemmisítő tábor] was built with many hundreds of thousands of granite
stones. Its turreted ramparts and the yawning gun ports in the battlements re-
veal to those arriving, from far away, that this is a fortified place.
The scene would be picturesque if a patina of centuries covered its stones,
but they shine with a glaring whiteness and disturb the color harmony of this
landscape wreathed about with dark forests.
The stones are white; the castle has just been built! It was built in the Third
Reich period, with the designation K.Z. Forty thousand Spanish freedom
fighters who had taken refuge in France were brought here after its occupa-
tion, along with a hundred thousand German Jewish men. These worked in the
terrible Mauthausen Quarry: they carved out and carried the stones over the
seven-kilometer mountain path where previously only wild goats had gone,
and joined them one to another until mighty walls rose around their wood-
barracks death house.
With sufferings inconceivable to the human imagination they built the cas-
tle, but they were not to be its inhabitants. They died without remnant [mara-
déktalanul elpusztultak] in this sea of stone and concrete!
116
Polish Płaszów, a suburb of Kraków.
117
Polish Racibórz, a small town near the Czech border, approximately seventy kilometers west of
Auschwitz.
The extermination camp did not remain uninhabited. Thousands of Yugo-

slav freedom fighters, members of resistance movements from all the con-
quered nations of Europe, and crowds ten-thousand strong of Jewry, con-
demned to extermination, filled the castle barracks within days and waited, at
short notice, for the end of their lives.
Our transport, tortured by hunger, by marching, by freezing cold, climbs
with difficulty up the long, snow-covered road. With the last remnants of our
strength we pass through the gate of the K.Z. We line up on the Appelplatz118
in the evening twilight.
I count my companions. Fischer, the dissection-hall laboratory assistant, is
missing! I last saw him in Plesow, he was lying exhausted in the snow at our
resting place. In the distorted features of his face I saw the signs of his immi-
nent end. He was a fifty-year-old man, a five-year resident of the K.Z.,; his
constitution could not endure the long march and the tribulations of the freez-
ing cold.
Dr. Körner, the young physician from Nice, is worn out but in tolerable
condition, Dr. Görög Dénes, the private lecturer from Szombathely, stands be-
side me in terminal condition. The confusion of his mind is now even more
pronounced than in the days at the crematorium. Already there the constant
concealment of his deficiency caused me trouble. I did everything to make
sure Dr. Mengele did not meet with him face to face. Mussfeld too was a dan-
gerous observer. My poor friend would not have remained alive even a few
minutes longer if his uselessness had been discovered.
Already in the crematorium he had made his will and imparted his wishes
to me.
“Miklos,” he said on one occasion, “you have such a strong will, you will
surely make it home, but I have the feeling I will not live to see the end of
things. My wife and my little girl died here in the gas chamber, I am sure of
that. I hid a small boy with the brothers of the Köszeg Monastery; he is my
child, little 12-year-old Sándor. Take him in, if you make it home; this is my
wish, in the certain consciousness of my death.” I readily promised him that I
would act according to his wishes.
By a lucky twist of fate we have arrived far from the scene of our certain
deaths and now, at the end of a long journey, before the goal, when the hope
of freedom has filled our inner selves, that he should have to die now, this is
more than a tragedy!
After roll call we are herded into a narrow alleyway leading to the bath.
We mix with people brought from other camps; they too are waiting to be
bathed. There might be ten thousand of us crowded together in the narrow
space. A terrible wind howls between the walls of the high fortress. We are on
a mountaintop, in the foothills of the Alps. The winter here is very harsh!
118
In German in the original. Correctly Appellplatz.
They let people into the bath in groups of forty. Such is its reception capac-
ity. I perform a quick calculation and realize that it will take three days for
everyone to have a turn!
The Reichsdeutsche criminals [a birodalmi német bűnözők]119 perform the
firefighting duties here; they are the SS’s most faithful servants. They do the
assembling of groups for bathing. The turn for the Aryan prisoners comes
first; there are so many of them that the Jews will have to wait three days to go
through the bath. After so long a journey, however, this is here a question of
life and death! Only by way of the bath can a prisoner get into a barrack and
appear on the provisioning list. In the meantime he stands, hungry and thirsty,
in the terrible cold, exhausted from the ten-day journey, and waits for as long
as he feels strength in his legs and his weary eyes can fight off sleep. If his
strength gives out, he lies down in the snow and never gets up again. There
might be three hundred who are already lying thus around me.
No one takes any notice of them! Here everyone cares only for himself! In
the end we are fighting for our lives here!
I take stock of my situation and come to the conclusion that I cannot en-
dure a night of waiting without serious harm. I must get into the bath tonight!
Poor Dénes wanders here and there, bare-headed, without his glasses. The in-
telligence is disappearing from his face. Barely conscious, he circles about
like an automaton speaking unintelligible words. I take him by the arm and
drag him with me, if only we can manage to get into the bath that means life!
After a few steps he stops; already I have lost sight of him; he is hidden by the
drifting crowd. I call out in vain, in the wind I can barely hear my voice my-
self.
Sensing the danger I force my way through the crowd; with dogged tenaci-
ty I approach the entrance down into the bath. There I stand already, in the
front row of the great crowd!
A few SS men and firefighters with rubber truncheons are standing in front
of the group. It is a group of forty which is waiting, ready to enter. They are
all Aryans. With sudden decisiveness I step out of the crowd, stand before an
SS Oberscharführer and report to him in a determined voice:
“Oberscharführer! I am the doctor of the transport from K.Z. Auschwitz,
please let me into the bath.”
He looks me over. My good clothes, or my determined bearing, or perhaps
my speaking flawless German made an impression on him, I don’t know, but
he loudly yells across to his comrade standing guard by the stairs to the bath:
“Let the doctor go down!”
119
During the NS period, the term Reichsdeutsche referred to those Germans living within the bor-
ders of the German Reich proper, as opposed to ethnic Germans living elsewhere in Europe
(Volksdeutsche). Criminal convicts of German background formed a separate category of prison-
ers within the concentration-camp system.
I descended alone; I even preceded the group of forty already assembled. I

was saved! It went quite easily! It is often good to be a man of quick decisions
after all.120
In a few minutes the warm air of the baths magically restores life to my
limbs, gone numb from the cold. After ten bitter days I am in a heated room.
The bath itself also has a positive effect on my general well-being. Our clothes
are considered contaminated items; they will remain here! I regret the loss of
the fine winter coat, the excellent clothes, the warm pullover. Still, I am very
happy all the same, for they let me keep my shoes. Shoes in the K.Z., if they
are good ones, are half an assurance of life.
I pull them on and march, naked, with the group of those who have fin-
ished bathing, out onto the road in front of the bath, where we still must wait
for half an hour in the freezing cold until the group marching to the barracks is
complete. After a warm bath, to stand naked [meztelenül] for half an hour in
cold of 18 below and cutting wind is tempting death!
The succeeding group of forty joins up and finally we set off! Our SS es-
cort orders a double march and putting five hundred meters behind us we soon
arrive at Barracks 23 of the quarantine camp.
At the entrance is standing a green-badged ruffian, the barrack supervisor.
He hands a quarter loaf of bread to each person entering. A barracks duty man
puts a tablespoon of greasy canned meat on top of the bread, and pours us a
quarter liter of hot black coffee besides.
It is a princely meal after ten days of privation! I bolt it down in minutes
and go look for a place to lay myself down. I find a spot in a corner where I lie
down. This has the advantage that my fellow prisoners do not walk over me in
coming and going. Naturally I lay on the floor; there were no beds in the quar-
antine. Thus I slept without interruption until morning reveille.
I think of my poor comrades who are still standing in front of the baths, if
they are still able to stand!
For three days we sat or wandered idly about the rooms of the barracks, we
received passable food and rested up as best we could from the strains of the
journey.
On the third day it comes about that an SS officer arrives accompanied by
a camp clerk121 and calls on all those who have worked in the Auschwitz
crematorium to present themselves. The blood runs cold within me! Do they
have a list of us[?]122 They are so damned precise and well organized, it is
120
Nyiszli presumably is referring here to his earlier reflections on rapid decision making and how it
“does not always turn out well.” See Chapter XV.
121
The original edition here has the word tábornok meaning “general” (as in the military rank), and
this wording is reflected in earlier translations (cf. Seaver’s 1960 English translation, “accompa-
nied by a general”), but it most likely is an error for táborírnok (“camp clerk”) or some close vari-
ant thereof.
122
The original edition uses an exclamation mark here, but subsequent context makes it likely that a
question is intended.
very likely! I think it over and come to the conclusion that it is merely an at-
tempt at fishing out the secret bearers from the great crowd. If they had a list
they would look at our tattoo numbers. No one here knows me! In mute si-
lence I wait as the anxious minutes pass. I have won! I have again won life!
Still on that same day, after nightfall, we received striped canvas clothing
and started on our way over the mountain road toward the Mauthausen rail-
way station. There we were loaded onto wagons, and we set out in a transport
of seven thousand for the concentration camp of Melk an der Donau. We
managed the trip comfortably in closed wagons, sitting on the floor. We ar-
rived after a journey of three hours.
K.Z. Melk also dominates its surroundings from the top of a high hill.
Originally it was a pioneers’ garrison named after the Freiherr von Birabo.123
Its enormous barracks guarded as many as fifteen thousand prisoners within
their walls. The wonderful beauty of the landscape lightened the gloomy heav-
iness of our situation a good deal. The enormous baroque palace of the Melk
Abbey, built upon a rocky outcrop, and the valley of the Danube meandering
below the camp present a wonderful picture to the spectator. The Danube is a
Hungarian river too; we feel almost at home with ourselves.
Chapter XL
Spring arrived early in 1945. Already by the beginning of April the trees were
turning green in the ditches that bordered the electrified fence of the Melk
concentration camp. On the banks of the Danube meandering below us, the
melting snow gives way to green grass. For eight weeks I live through the
good and bad days of K.Z. life in this place. I am already exhausted and weak;
only the hope of approaching liberation holds me back from the abyss of leth-
argy.
Everything here is in a state of disintegration. The final phases of the col-
lapse of the Third Reich pass before our eyes like in a film.
Defeated armies march in endless columns toward the interior of their
homeland, now reduced to smoking ruins. On the Danube, swollen from the
spring thaws, hundreds of boats and barges evacuate the inhabitants of aban-
doned cities.
All things pass away! The dream of a Third Reich established for a thou-
sand years has vanished. The faith placed in the superiority of the race and the
consciousness of a calling to domination have given way to bitter disillusion-
ment.
No longer are the freedom-loving peoples of Europe menaced with the
danger that their cities will be obliterated and their valuables hauled away, and
123
Correctly, von Birago, name of a famous Austrian military engineer (“pioneer”) of the nineteenth
century.
that finally despoiled of everything, they will have a number burned onto their
arms [számot égetnek karjaikra] and be forced to perform slave labor sur-
rounded by death’s-head SS men and trained bloodhounds.
The pyromaniacal people of the Third Reich124 is disappearing from the
world stage; they started such fires that a whole world was seared by their
flames, but they themselves are now passing away in them.
The hoarse corporal’s voice which shouted “Deutschland über alles!”125
over the radio waves into the home of every inhabitant of the world has gone
silent.
The freedom-loving peoples have smashed the haughty pride of the Third
Reich and established a new direction for the life of peoples.
Three great men form and shape the character of the peoples of the world
and ensure their future: Stalin! the genius leader of the Russian people, Roo-
sevelt Franklin Delano,126 wise president of the United States, and Churchill,
the British lion.
On April 7, 1945, the chains of arc lamps along the posts supporting con-
centration camp Melk’s barbed-wire fences were not turned on! Darkness and
an immense silence settled over the forsaken place. The camp was evacuated,
its gate was closed and its seven thousand inhabitants were hauled away again.
By ship, then on highways crowded with refugees, and even over mountains
covered with snow, the weary column marches for seven days until it arrives
at the end of its journey.
The Ebensee Concentration Camp is the fourth in the series of K.Z.’s
whose gates we enter.
Here the first number on the program is roll call, which lasts hours. The
second is the bath, the third is the filthy quarantine barracks, with their rubber-
truncheon executioners.
I went through all three numbers. A biting, cold wind blows, icy rain soaks
my flimsy clothes during the long Appels.127 A wild bitterness burns within
me. I am certain that it is only a question of days and we will be liberated. We
wait impatiently for something to happen, but then it might not happen only to
our benefit. The end of our imprisonment could also be a bloody tragedy.
They could exterminate us before our liberators arrive.
124
Unlike English, Hungarian distinguishes lexically between “people” in the sense of a national or
ethnic collective (e.g., “the German people”), for which the word nép is used, and “people” in the
sense of a mere group of individuals (e.g., “the people in charge”), for which emberek would be
expected. By his use of the word nép here (“a III. Birodalom piromániás népe”), Nyiszli thus as-
serts that it is the German people itself, and not merely its leadership, which is disappearing from
the world stage as a result of its “pyromania.”
125
“Germany above all things,” first line of the German national anthem. In German in the original.
126
Nyiszli gives Roosevelt’s name Hungarian-style, last name first.
127
Correctly, Appells. In German in the original.
It would be a fitting end for us in the captivity of the Third Reich, in a state
beyond the protection of human law, after a life of twelve months in the death
house.
It did not happen thus! On May 5, 1945, a white flag flutters on the tower
of Ebensee Concentration Camp. The spring sun shines with dazzling white-
ness. It is over! They have laid down their arms! Around nine o’clock a little
American tank arrives with three soldiers and takes over the camp. We are
free!…
Epilogue
The state of being beyond the protection of all human law gave way to the
consciousness of freedom, to a desire for great spaces which all at once rea-
wakens my disintegrating energies.
Sick, broken in body and soul, I start on the way toward home. The satis-
faction of nostalgia does not make my way any easier, for in the place of
flourishing cities I am greeted everywhere by charred ruins and cemeteries full
of mass graves.
I dread the reality that my parents will not be waiting for me in my ruined
family home, that I will be without the comforting love of my wife, my child,
my sister.
The humiliations, the sorrows, the horrors of the crematoria and the pyres,
the eight months of life in the death house in the Kommando of the walking
dead, have dulled the perception of good and evil within me.
I feel it! I must rest, collect my forces. But the question is, is there any
sense in going on?
On the one hand the fever of my illness burns me, on the other, the bloody
past freezes my heart.
My eyes followed two million innocent people to the gas chambers, and I
was witness to the horrors of the pyres [Kétmillió ártatlan embert kísértek
szemeim a gázkamarákig és voltam tanúja a máglyák borzalmainak].
I opened hundreds of corpses [hullák százait] at the orders of an at once
brilliant and quietly mad doctor so that a science founded on false theories
might profit from the crowds of millions sent to die in the gas or on the pyres.
I cut the flesh from the dead bodies of healthy young girls and prepared
rich nutritive media from them for Dr. Mengele’s bacterial cultures.
I put the corpses of cripples and dwarves in a bath of calcium chloride or
cooked them for days at a time so that clean skeletons might go to German
museums, where they are required to demonstrate to future generations the
necessity of the extermination of a people.
Two times I felt the touch of the wind of death as I lay before the weapons
of execution squads. I took my leave from the bloody bodies of one thousand
three hundred of my companions [ezerháromszáz bajtársam], that I alone

might remain as witness [hogy egyedül maradjak hírmondónak].
I marched for hundreds of kilometers over snow-covered fields, fighting
off icy death, that I might be the inhabitant of yet other extermination camps. I
have come a long way to get here!
I find no place for myself in my apartment. I pace aimlessly back and forth
between the silent walls. My past is full of bloody memories and deep sor-
rows, and the future before me is dark.
I wander through the familiar streets like a restless shadow of myself. I am
only ever shaken out of my profound lethargy if I think I glimpse my loved
ones among those who come and go.
Mutely I endure the pains of my illness and, sunk into myself, I count the
passing of the months. It is already October. Six months have passed since my
liberation.
Feeling chilly, I sit one prematurely gloomy afternoon waiting for solace
from the warmth of the stove in the darkness of my room.
Suddenly the bell rings and the door opens. My wife and daughter walk in
through it. Bergen-Belsen, the infamous extermination camp, was their place
of liberation, from which they have now returned home in good health. So
much they told me; the rest they sobbed out over hours, but even so I under-
stood and learned everything.
Now there is a reason to go on! I have a for-whom and a why! I want to
work again. The satisfaction of being able to help will be a good feeling, but
as for the dead, I will not dissect them any more.
Part 2:
Other Documents
by and about Miklós Nyiszli

2.1. Miklós Nyiszli’s Declaration of July 28, 1945

Charles D. Provan states that, while reading Robert Jay Lifton’s book The Na-
zi Doctors, he ran across a quotation from a statement by Nyiszli dated July
28, 1945. It is titled “Deposition: Miklof Nyifcli [sic]. A Physician from
Nagyvarod in Hungary.” Provan received the English translation of this state-
ment from Lifton, and discussed it in his article on Nyiszli mentioned earlier.
Lifton does not provide any archival information about Nyiszli’s statement,
merely asserting that it was made “before the Budapest Commission for the
Welfare of Deported Hungarian Jews” (Lifton 1986, Note 31, p. 527). I will
return to this commission later, whose Hungarian name was Magyaroszági
Zsidók Deportáltakat Gondozó Bizottság.
This post-war institute collected and recorded testimonies of deported Hungar-
ian Jews. Nyiszli’s testimony is number 3632. The original text (see Docu-
ment 2) and an English translation of Nyiszli’s testimony are available at the
DEBOG website.128 It is introduced by an information card that says:
“Protocol Nr. 3632
Name: N. M.
Gender: male
Occupation: physician /Nagyvárad/”
The original statement is devoid of any identifying element, and has the regis-
tration date of July 29, 1945, so it is without doubt a subsequent transcript of
the document mentioned by Lifton and Provan.
I quote below the English translation of this declaration as taken from the
website mentioned, but with variations in crucial points based on the original
Hungarian text:
“On May 22, 1944, along with 26 of my colleagues (all medical doctors taken
by force), I was sent from the Aknaszlatina ghetto to Auschwitz. Following se-
lection, I was sent to the right and, after a 24-hour stay in Auschwitz, I was
transferred to Buna with an inmate population of 14 thousand. There I worked
for about 12 days in the 197th concrete commando [betonkommandonál] when
the chief medical officer of the Buna Camp (an SS Hauptsturmführer) sum-
moned all physicians to appear before him. We lined up, all fifty of us. They
told us that professional pathologists could volunteer for light work. Of the fif-
ty physicians, two stepped forward; I was all the more eager to volunteer as I
had already realized I could not have continued the hard concrete work. Fol-
lowing a thorough oral examination and an interview, the two of us were ac-
cepted. I studied medicine in Germany and practiced as a pathologist for many
128
Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság: National Assistance Committee for Deportees;
http://degob.org/index.php?showjk=3632; last accessed on Jan. 24, 2018.
years. I easily passed the test, as did my colleague who worked in a Medical
School in Strasbourg. Within one hour, accompanied by two armed SS guards,
we were put in a well-equipped Red Cross ambulance. To my horror, we were
driven to the courtyard of Crematorium 1 in Auschwitz where our documents
were handed over to the commander of the Crematorium, Oberscharführer
Mussfeld. They immediately gave us precise instructions what we may and
may not look at. Then we were led into a clean room, and Oberscharführer
Mussfeld let us know that it was equipped specifically for us at the orders of
Dr. Mengele. The crematorium staff, known as the Sonderkommando which
consisted of some two hundred inmates, lived on the second floor. The Ober-
scharführer immediately requisitioned for us a full set of clothing and under-
wear of excellent quality taken from gassed victims.
Dr. Mengele arrived after a few hours and put us through another oral exami-
nation lasting about one hour. He then gave us our first assignment: it in-
volved the medical examination of selected individuals with some form of ab-
normal development. We took measurements of these people, then Ober-
scharführer Mussfeld shot them in the head with a ‘Kleinkaliber,’ i.e., a 6-mm
gun, after which we were ordered to perform an autopsy and prepare a de-
tailed report. Subsequently, we applied chlorinated lime to the abnormally de-
veloped corpses and sent the thoroughly cleaned and packed bones to the An-
thropological Institute in Berlin-Dahlem.
These experiments were repeated sporadically, until one day at midnight SS
officers woke us and led us to the dissecting room, where dr. Mengele was al-
ready waiting for us.
In the laboratory next to the autopsy room there were 14 twins under SS
guard, sobbing bitterly. Without saying a word, Dr. Mengele prepared a 10-
cm³ and a 5-cm³ syringe. From a container he took out Evipan, from another
he took 20-cm³ chloroform vials and put them on the table. Then the first twin
was brought in, a girl of around 14 years of age. Dr. Mengele ordered me to
undress her and place her on the autopsy table. Then he administered an in-
travenous injection of Evipan into the right arm. After the child lost con-
sciousness, he palpated for the left ventricle and injected 10 cm³ of chloro-
form. The child died after a convulsion, and Dr. Mengele had her taken to the
morgue. The murder of all 14 twins happened in the same way that night.[129]
Dr. Mengele asked us whether we could perform 7-8 autopsies. To this we re-
plied that to do precise scientific work, we could dissect an average four
corpses a day. He accepted that. We received subjects for our scientific autop-
sies either from the camp or recently arrived transports. In the months of May,
June and July an average of 3-4 Hungarian transports arrived at the Ausch-
witz Judenrampe. The selections were performed in shifts by Dr. Mengele and
Dr. Thilo. Ability to work was the sole selection criteria [sic], and at times it
was quite capricious.
129
The underscored passage is the one cited by R. J. Lifton. See Section 5.2.2.
As part of the selection process, newly arrived transports were divided into
two groups – one to the right, the other to the left. The right side meant life,
the left side the crematorium. In terms of percentage, 78-80% were sent to the
left: children, mothers with small children, the elderly, pregnant women, hand-
icapped and disabled servicemen. In a few minutes, the crowd on the left start-
ed to move slowly to the left, carrying their personal belongings. The cremato-
ria were around 200 meters from the Judenrampe, and the crowd of approxi-
mately 2000 people passed under the gate of Crematoria 1, 2, 3 or 4 as or-
dered. At the crematorium, they descended 10-12 concrete steps and entered
an empty, underground room with a capacity of 2000 [people]. The first row
stopped instinctively at the entrance, but once they read the signs ‘Disinfec-
tion’ and ‘Bath’ printed in all major languages, they were reassured and de-
scended the steps. They were immediately ordered to undress; there were
benches and numbered clothes hooks along the walls of the room. As part of a
careful misinformation strategy, the SS suggest that everyone memorize their
number to make sure they will find their clothes after the bath without prob-
lem. The crowed was reassured, although the fact that men, women and chil-
dren were made to undress in front of each other caused discomfort for many.
After about ten minutes the crowd of 2000 [persons] was herded more roughly
into the next concrete room with a capacity of around 2000 [persons] without
any furnishing or windows. This was the gas chamber. The heavy oak doors
were shut behind them, the lights were turned off, and in a few minutes a luxu-
ry car with the Red Cross insignia arrived. A doctor with the rank of captain
and his assistant unloaded four metal containers weighing approximately 1 kg
each. They removed the four concrete lids covering the ventilation shafts lead-
ing to the underground bunker; they put on their gas masks, punctured the lid
of the metal containers, and dumped the bean-sized, purple [or rather] burgun-
dy-colored chlorine pellets into the four openings. Then they immediately cov-
ered the openings with the concrete covers.
On one occasion I chanced to hear the SS doctor urging his assistant: ‘Gib
schon das Fressen den Juden!’ [‘Give the fodder to the Jews!’]
The gas pellets fell, and right on contact with air developed chlorine gas that
caused the most-cruel death by suffocation within 5 to 10 minutes.
After thirty minutes, the ventilators were switched on, members of the
Sonderkommando on duty opened the door of the gas chamber, and there were
lying 2000 corpses covered in blood (from bleeding noses) and feces. Instead
of being spread out evenly on the bunker floor, they were piled up on top of
each other one story high, explained by the fact that the chlorine gas reached
the higher [air] layers with some delay. The Sonderkommando washed the
corpses with a hose, and the bodies were then loaded in an elevator and hoist-
ed to the furnace room. The furnace room consisted of 15 furnaces, each
equipped with its own electric blower. A trained unit dragged the corpses by
hooking the curved end of a walking cane into their mouths. Three bodies were
stacked in each furnace at a time, and it took twenty minutes to reduce them
into ashes. Before the cremation, a dentist commando removed golden teeth
from the dead bodies.
The so-called ‘ash commando’ was ordered to remove the ashes from time to
time and crush the bones that did not burn completely. Once a week the ashes
were dumped into the nearby Wistula River.
On November 17, 1944, cremations at the crematoria were prohibited in the
entire country [sic], and no inmates were murdered anymore after that date.
However, in order to eliminate eyewitnesses to the darkest secrets of the polit-
ical SS, members of the Sonderkommando of Crematoria 1, 2, 3, and 4, count-
ing 846 [inmates], were executed between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. the same day.
The victims included one hundred Hungarian Jews, as well as forty Russian
military officers, and the rest were Jews from France, Holland, Belgium and
Poland. We doctors were there among our comrades facing the machine guns,
but Dr. Mengele – whose work on race biology had not been completed yet –
pulled us out from among the condemned. We continued our work quietly in
the deserted crematorium – without gassing and summary executions – until
January 18, 1945, when the Russians broke through the German lines at Var-
anovice[130] and Krakow, and by midnight they were within 6 km of Auschwitz.
The SS fell into a panic; they brought us into the camp where they left us to
our fate. Mixed in a crowd of around 4000 inmates, no one knew that we were
members of the Sonderkommando. The same night unknown SS guards took us
on a forced March to Mauthausen.”
130
No such place exists. Nyiszli possibly referred to Wadowice, a town some 25 km south-east of
Auschwitz and some 35 km south-west of Krakow.
2.2. Miklós Nyiszli’s “Testimony” at the I.G. Farben

Trial
2.2.1. The “Testimony”
As mentioned earlier, the 1964 edition of Nyiszli’s book, Orvos voltam
Auschwitzban, contains an appendix with useful information worth reporting
(p. 193):
“In what follows we publish passages of the verbal testimony made under oath
by Dr. Miklós Nyiszli during the criminal proceedings against the executives
of the I.G. Farbenindustrie A.G. before the International Military Tribunal in
Nuremberg.
We have collected the passages on the basis of a typed text and a sworn state-
ment that is in the possession of the author’s widow.
The author published his testimony in the form of articles titled ‘I Was a Wit-
ness at Nuremberg’ in the April [and May] 1948 issues of the Budapest news-
paper ‘Világ’.
In 1947, Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, driven by a sense of moral duty, approached the
International Tribunal conducting the trial against war criminals, and asked
to appear as a witness. At the written request of the Tribunal, he swiftly went
to Nuremberg, where he took part as a witness during the trial against the ex-
ecutives of I.G. Farbenindustrie. He was present at seventeen audiences. His
interrogation was conducted by the chief prosecutor E.E. Minskov [Minskoff]
representing the Soviets at the tribunal. He handed over his written statement
to U.S. chief prosecutor Benvenuto van Halle. At the end, the statement’s text
has this authentication: […] The International Tribunal of Nuremberg retains
a copy of the original document in its archive.
In his testimony, Dr. Nyiszli had to answer the following questions, among
other things: What was the treatment of prisoners working at the I.G.-
Farbenindustrie plant? What do you know of experiments made on living peo-
ple, of gases used for the mass extermination of people? What medical diagno-
sis was made to adduce the cause of death by gas? What observations did he
make regarding the frame of mind of officers, non-commissioned officers and
soldiers? What was their behavior, their attitude while perpetrating homi-
cides? Etc.
The passages of the testimony that are cited provide the answer to these ques-
tions.
We consider the following information necessary. The book is titled ‘I Was Dr.
Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist in the Auschwitz Crematorium.’ During the
trial, the Tribunal asked for a copy of Miklós Nyiszli’s book, and later the ex-
perts examined it in detail and compared his statements with the documents
available to the trial, with numerous unknown details, [and] considered the
book a documentation that demonstrated everything perfectly, and they treated

it as a document.
This is not mentioned in the book [which follows], so the reader needs this
clarification: after his deportation to Auschwitz, Dr. Miklós Nyiszli one day
went to the Monowitz labor camp and stayed there only two weeks, after which
he was assigned to the Auschwitz crematorium as a forensic pathologist on the
order of Dr. Mengele. According to a statement by the author’s widow, Dr.
Nyiszli, by omitting the part about Monowitz, aimed at maintaining the uni-
formity of the book’s structure, since he did not want to break the main argu-
ment; in the Auschwitz death camp they saw the immortalization.[131] We must
accept this procedure; it does not affect the book’s credibility at all, as is
shown by the many new data of this testimony.”
Several excerpts of Nyiszli’s 1948 articles follow, but the text’s style is heavi-
ly edited and has omissions that are not indicated.
2.2.2. “Tanú voltam Nürnbergben” – “I Was a Witness at

Nuremberg”
With this title, the newspaper Világ (World) published a series of articles by
Nyiszli in April and May 1948, as mentioned above (see Document 3). They
appeared in 27 sequels, subdivided into 12 chapters, which are in turn divided
into several paragraphs. The following list has the relevant information.
1. April 18, 1948, p. 6 15. May 6, 1948, p. 4
2. April 20, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter I 16. May 8, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter VII
3. April 21, 1948, p. 4 17. May 9, 1948, p. 6
4. April 22, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter II 18. May 11, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter VIII
5. April 23, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter III 19. May 12, 1948, p. 4
6. April 24, 1948, p. 4 20. May 13, 1948, p. 4
7. April 25, 1948, p. 6 21. May 14, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter IX
8. April 27, 1948, p. 4 22. May 15, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter X
9. April 28, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter IV 23. May 16, 1948, p. 6
10. April 29, 1948, p. 4 24. May 19, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter XI
11. April 30, 1948, p. 4 25. May 20, 1948, p. 4 / Chapter XII
12. May 1, 1948, p. 6 / Chapter V 26. May 21, 1948, p. 4
13. May 4, 1948, p. 6 / Chapter VI 27. May 22, 1948, p. 4
14. May 5, 1948, p. 4
131
This sentence’s subject is unclear, as is its meaning; perhaps the author intended to say that
Nyiszli and his wife wanted to immortalize in particular the memory of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Camp.
Nyiszli’s account is not a simple chronicle of events, but wanders off into his-
torical and philosophical diversions and divagations. He himself states that he
has used the following works when compiling his articles:
– Ilya Ehrenburg, New Century (Hungarian edition);
– Eugène Aroneau, Le crime contre l’humanité (The Crime against Huma-
nity);
– Das Urteil von Nürnberg (The Nuremberg Verdict);
– Grundlage eines neues Völkerrechts (Foundations of a New International
Law)
– The publication of the Nuremberg Archives;
– Psychiatrische Monatshefte Breslau. Psyche und Verbrechen (Breslau
Psychiatric Monthly. Psyche and Crime).
In his introduction, Nyiszli writes:
“The dead don’t come back to life.
Under the title ‘I Was Dr. Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist in the Auschwitz
Crematorium,’ I wrote a book that was published a year and a half after the
end of the war. Its pages are red with blood, and black with mourning. Doubt-
lessly I disturbed my companion of misery in his pain. I cannot deny that, as a
result of my writing, many wounds have been reopened. However, I had to
bring to light my own experiences. I cannot share the opinion of those who, in
describing the great historical processes, assume a historical perspective. In
my opinion, what is needed is not the historical perspective, but FREEDOM, if
the writer wants to convey his argument. I am a free citizen of a democratic
state, and as such I have written my book on Auschwitz. I was able to learn
about crimes of doctors perpetrated on a vast scale with perverse sadism and
their power based on violence.”
Nyiszli reportedly made himself available to testify at the “Nuremberg Inter-
national Tribunal” in the autumn of 1947.
He claims to have sent the following letter to the court:
“The Declaration. […]
To the International Tribunal at Nuremberg.
The undersigned, Dr. Miklós Nyiszli, MD, Oradea, resident of Nagyvarad,
Romania, former detainee of the KZ [concentration camps] with number A-
8450, declare the following:
In May 1944 I was dismissed from the administrative medical services and de-
ported to Auschwitz with my family and with my mother and my sister. There
our transport was subject to a selection. The selecting physician was an SS
Hauptsturmführer named Josef Mengele, who at that time served as a medical
officer at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and the 40 sub-camps in the ar-
ea.
We were about fifty doctors. They lined us up. Dr. Mengele asked us: ‘Is there
a doctor among you who has completed studies at a university of the German
Reich and who has perfect knowledge of forensic pathology? Is there an expert
anatomist among you whose oral and written German skills are perfect?’”
Nyiszli stepped forward. Dr. Mengele interviewed him, and, satisfied with the
answers he received, he sent him to Barracks #12 of Camp Section F. As re-
ported in the book, Nyiszli was examined in the presence of an SS medical
commission in the local dissection room, and had to dissect corpses for five
days. Then he was sent to Crematorium II.
“Inside the death factory.
Already on the sixth day in Auschwitz’s Crematorium I, it occurred to me with
a shock that fate had dragged me into a death factory of the Third Reich. I was
finished in the sinister circle of the Kommando of the living dead, the
Sonderkommando, marked as S.K. Already a few minutes after my arrival I
encountered the Third Reich’s darkest secrets and, as a keeper of them, I did
not doubt even for a moment that anyone who had entered it would not get out
alive.
Dr. Mengele determined the sphere of my work and handed me the keys to a
highly modern dissection room and a laboratory. The Sonderkommando’s staff
consisted of 860 inmates. The men were lodged in a large communal accom-
modation in the crematorium. Dr. Mengele was also the director of pretended
scientific research. This research included the following fields:
1. Study of twin phenomena on living people. This research was carried out by
Dr. Epstein, ordinarius at the University of Prague, who had been in custody
for five years now.
2. After the examination of the living twins had been completed, the protocol of
the medical examination, the radiographs and the drawings were placed in
their folder, and then the twins were killed in couples with an intracardiac in-
jection, i.e. into the heart (chloroform, I.G. Farben, special packaging). The
injections caused immediate death. The bodies were marked with the letters
Z.S. written with blue chalk on the skin of the left side of the chest. The symbol
Z.S. is the abbreviation of zur Sektion [to dissection]. At the same time, the in-
formation was communicated to the dissection [team]. In this way the corpses
arrived at the dissection room of Crematorium II.
3. With a precise work of forensic pathology, we had to evaluate the internal
twin phenomena. In the protocol, all the phenomena that could be revealed
had to be reported. We had to add the protocol to the material contained in the
folder from the live exam. Another task of mine was to study the phenomena of
Jewish degeneration, first on the living, then on the dead.[132]
4. Human material to support the theory of Jewish degeneration from a medi-
cal point of view. Already on the arrival of Jewish transports, Dr. Mengele
chose the material when [the deportees] lined up for selection. Right from the
ramp, Dr. Mengele selected individuals or pairs. For example, father and son,
mother and children, siblings. The SS guards accompanied them separately to
132
Világ, April 18, 1948, Part 1, p. 6.
the crematorium, where, after their examinations ‘in vivo,’ they were finished
off with a shot into the nape of their neck (official name: Obergenickschüt-
ze[133]). Oberscharführer Mussfeld killed them with a shot into the nape of
their neck (with a small gun of 6 mm). After that, the bodies arrived at the dis-
section room, where the degenerative phenomena had to be evaluated from the
point of view of pathological anatomy.
5. It was forbidden to cremate corpses with a conspicuous deformative genetic
anomaly. Their skeletons had to be prepared with precise work, and they all
had to be shipped with a dispatch note stating ‘Urgent Shipment of Military
Importance.’ The recipient was the Institute for Genetic and Racial Research
in Berlin-Dahlem.
6. I also prepared many other forensic protocols: in cases of death through
bludgeoning, high voltage electricity, shooting, injuries, and in many [other]
cases, I had to write a false diagnosis in the respective protocols, such as the
cause of death. In many cases of murder, I was ordered to forge the causes of
death in order to conceal a huge crime.
7. I was an eyewitness of all four crematoria and of the pyres during all the
phases of the extermination activity.
8. With this request of mine, I recall with appreciation the names of my former
inmate comrades who are still alive and, as direct subordinates of Dr.
Mengele, can fully confirm my accusations listed in the points outlined above.
Prof. Dr. Epstein A., university professor, Prague (Auschwitz II, Zigeunerla-
ger [Gypsy Camp])
Dr. Bendel, J., physician, Paris (Auschwitz II, crematorium)
Dr. Lewy, Robert, university professor, Strasbourg, (Camp Sector F)
Dr. Körner, József, physician, Nizza (Auschwitz, Crematorium II, dissection
room).
Dr. Nyiszli Miklós.”
Nyiszli then reports the result of his request:
“Not before long, the answer came. I received the invitation [to appear] before
the court. I presented and attended 17 hearings as a witness.”
In the following paragraph titled “The Nuremberg Tribunal,” Nyiszli lists the
members of the International Military Tribunal (Donnedieu de Vabres, Justice
Geoffrey Lawrence, Iona T. Nikitchenko, Alxander F. Volchkov, Francis Bid-
dle, John I. Parker, Justice Norman Birkett) and “prosecutors authorized to re-
ceive testimony,” such as Joseph F. Tubridy, George G. Taylor, and Ian D.
McIlwraith, and also Emanuel Minskoff and Benvenuto von Halle,134 who
were all members of the International Military Tribunal, except for the last
two, who only participated in the I.G. Farben Trial.135
133
German in the original, “chief neck-shooter.”
134
Nyszli always writes “van Halle.”
135
This is followed by historical and philosophical digressions on Nuremberg

and Germany in Nyiszli’s typical rhetoric. This was inspired by his summons
to this city by the Office of the U.S. Military Government of Germany.
Nyiszli tells of his trip to Nuremberg, to the Palace of Justice, without giv-
ing a date:”136
“On the second floor, I look for Room No. 297 in front of dark doors. This is
the number given in the summons. I have to go to Room 297. After a short
search, I come to the door. On a small white plate I read: E. E. MINSKOFF
Chief of Counsel for War Crimes. Two guards, American Negroes, watch the
entrance.
‘The entry ticket, please,” says one of the two. I give it to him. They examine
my entry ticket.
‘The folder, please.’ I open the folder. They take a look, then they salute. I can
enter.”
Minskoff gave Nyiszli a questionnaire with the following topics:137
“1. Inhumane treatment of concentration camp inmates who worked at the I.G.
Farben construction site.
2. The exclusive request for strong detainees fit for labor, the selection and
evacuation of the weak from the construction site without [leaving] a trace.
3. The medical treatment of inmates which ceased in the event of an illness
lasting more than three weeks.
4. Did high-ranking staff members of I.G. Farben visit the work sites? Did you
witness inhumane work carried out by detainees, that is, with insufficient
clothing, insufficient food, regardless of weather conditions?
5. Did high-ranking staff members of I.G. Farben visit the Stammlager of
Auschwitz and the crematoria?
6. Did you know any of them?
7. Were you aware of experiments on living people with medicine by I.G. Far-
ben?
8. The detainees sent to the crematorium who were taken there from the I.G.
Farben construction site, were they marked? Did they arrive with a mark?
Can it be established that they came from the [labor] service at the I.G. to be
exterminated?
9. What do you know about the gas used for the mass extermination of people
in the crematoria of Auschwitz?
10. How did the gassing process unfold?”
Two days later, Nyiszli states, he met Minskoff at 9 o’clock:138
“‘Did you finish the task, Doctor?’ He asked me amicably.
‘Yes, I finished it.’
136
137
138
‘Then I instantly call in here the American prosecutor van Halle. He is the au-
thorized prosecutor to authenticate statements made under oath, the affidavit.’
Soon thereafter, van Halle enters. I introduce myself.
‘I already heard of your arrival. Can I have the notes?’
I give him the writings I have written in German. He takes a look at the notes.
‘Would you please sign all the pages pf the notes.’
After my signature, van Halle signs with his signature in the margins. With
these notes, the case file is enhanced by 16 affidavits.”
Minskoff asked Nyiszli to stay at the Palace of Justice because in the morning
his presence in the courtroom would probably be necessary.
“At 11 am sharp in Room 284 next to the courtroom where the I.G. Farben
case will take place. On the door you can read that it’s the ‘witness room.’”
Nyiszli gets there, as he recounts:
“A few minutes before 11, I am waiting for my turn in the witness room next to
the courtroom of the I.G. Farben case. Just a few minutes, and the door to the
courtroom opens. An American officer appears in the door and calls: ‘Mr.
Nyiszli.’ […] He accompanies me into the courtroom and shows me my place.
I sit on a chair in the witness stand. In front of me is a small table with a mi-
crophone. A headset, a glass and a bottle of water. I have time to look around,
to observe. There are journalists, photo reporters, lawyers, visitors from all
over the world who do not miss an opportunity to attend at least one day of the
hearing of the Nuremberg Trial.”
This is followed by a description of the courtroom. Then he states:139
“Suddenly, chief prosecutor Minskoff lights a little blue electric lamp on the
table. His voice can be heard. A subdued whistle breaks the silence as they
start an electric recorder.
Minskoff gets up from his seat and begins to read the charges:
‘Here, on the bench of the defendants, there are men who have only recently
played a leading role in their fatherland. A group of executives, directors of
the I.G. Farben, is now facing the International Tribunal’s judges, indicted
with the charge of organized and continued crimes against peace and humani-
ty. The number of victims amounts to several million. How were the sons of a
European nation capable of committing so many murders?
I will give an explanation in three points.
1. The suspension of criminal law in the Third Reich and in the territories un-
der its occupation, at the expense and to the detriment of single persons or the
masses.
2. In this respect being of service to the crimes of the central power.
3. The organized extermination approved by the State.’”
139
Nyiszli then reports about Minskoff’s indictment of the Third Reich as a

“rogue state,”140 thus reaching the crucial point of the narration. Suddenly,
Minskoff turned to Nyiszli and pointed at him with his finger, asserting:
“‘A physician sits here in the witness stand. On our invitation, he came from
Romania before this High Court, and without coercion made a deposition here
supported by accurate data, on a multitude of crimes, on a monstrosity, on
perpetrated horrors, which alone are sufficient to ascertain the guilt, that is to
say, to confirm the defendants’ crimes within the crimes against peace and
humanity that I have grouped in 16 points as the subject of this trial and that I
have read out to you.
I also call the prosecutors’ attention to the fact that the physician Dr. Miklós
Nyiszli has appeared here as a witness. His testimony is interesting also in this
regard, and possesses an extraordinary value, since during his imprisonment
he stayed more or less long in five concentration camps of the Third Reich. He
worked for 8 months as a forensic pathologist in the crematorium of Ausch-
witz. Thus, he was able to provide a precise report on the life in the Monowitz
Concentration Camp, but at the same time also makes a precise deposition
about the extermination of transports of exhausted deportees. Such crimes he
witnessed in several cases.
The prosecutor lifted a copy of my book from his desk.
‘In that regard, the doctor’s statement is also important because he put it in
writing in a 1946 volume, thus submitting his experiences. We requested this
copy from the author. Our experts have examined its data and, having com-
pared them with the documents available during this trial for the past two
years, regard it as documentary material because with its description it has
shed light on hitherto still rather unknown details.’
Then, Attorney General Minskoff sat down.”141
“In my headphone, Attorney General Minskoff’s voice said:
‘Dr. Miklós Nyiszli! You came here from your home to testify without any con-
straint in front of the International Military Tribunal. I remind you that giving
false testimony is a crime. So, you will report what you know about the attest-
ed-to treatment of concentration camp inmates working in I.G. Farben plants.’
I confess, at this moment I feel a little anxiety. Now I have to talk, and the at-
tention of the whole world is turned on me. I, a simple physician, have ended
up with my testimony in the center of an important and complicated world tri-
bunal. But all this lasts only a second. I see the microphone in front of me and,
without uneasiness, without anxiety, I begin to talk:
‘Honorable Prosecutors! I ask permission to make my testimony in German,
as I speak this language fluently.’”
At this point, Nyiszli claims, he read verbatim into the record his “proce-
dural file appearing as document U.S. AGO D4325.32.”
140
141
Actually, this is not a procedural file, but the registration number of the ci-
vilian employee Benvenuto von Halle; the actual “procedural file” is Nurem-
berg Document NI-11710, which will be discussed later.
Then begins the description of the Monowitz Camp, which was 12 km
away from Auschwitz:
“The region, flat, yellow-loamy, barren, serves as a purpose the Silesian coal
mines that are found in the immediate vicinity. As is known, gasoline and rub-
ber are produced from coal. Forty thousand inmates are deployed here on the
huge construction site. Polish and Russian men and women deported from
their homes, a thousand English aviators and about 20,000 deportees. Chris-
tians and Jews intermingled. French, German, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian and
similarly intermingled. The establishment, that is, the entire construction site
is a fenced-in area. Watch towers 30-50 meters apart from one another char-
acterize the concentration camp. SS sentinels guard it on the towers next to
heavy automatic weapons, and patrols armed to the teeth circulate in the work
area. The prisoner’s lodgings are located 4-12 km from the workplace, de-
pending on where the individual Kommandos work. The detainees of the
Monowitz Concentration Camp are divided into 200 labor Kommandos; some
of the detainees are employed in construction work, the rest in mining coal.”
After the roll call – there were 7,000 were – the camp commander told the de-
portees that Monowitz was not a “Schonungslager” (recovery camp), but a
concentration camp where they had to work with all their effort. “If you don’t,
you will all croak in the reinforced concrete.” At Monowitz, Nyiszli was as-
signed to Kommando No. 197 at the construction site.142
This is followed by a long description of camp life:
“I remember the Egyptian pyramids, during the construction of which there
was a similar toiling. In any Kommando detainees work who, if loaded wagons
arrived, have the most urgent task of unloading them. Almost all of Germany’s
wagons come here – we think –. With all available construction material. Our
detainees must unload them, and can do so in a short time only at an inhuman
pace. Better is the case if you need to unload bricks, concrete and hardware
near the wagons. The murderer imposes this work when it is necessary to
bring the heavy building material by hand, on the back or on the shoulders to
the workplace located several hundred meters away from the wagons. But we
must know that in the concentration camp work is carried out at a pace of
running. La I.G. Farben takes advantage of our strength at every moment of
working time.
Six bricks in one hand stacked on top of each other, a 50 kg cement bag on the
shoulders or back, a 4 m long iron tube of 8 cm diameter on two men’s shoul-
ders or a long and thick cable [supported] at [a distance of] one meter:[143] it
142
143
The cable was carried by three detainees at a distance of one meter from each other.
weighs 100 kg. Yes, it would weigh 100 kg if only those walking in front of me
and behind me carried a part of the pipe themselves. But it often happens that
my companions are of lower stature or simply don’t do it. So my grazed shoul-
ders bend under the [weight of the] three parts of the cable. It is not even
worth risking to break my head by putting the cap on my chafed shoulders in
order to relieve the pressure of the iron pipe. The SS guards, the I.G. Farben
engineers in sport suits, the corpulent German master builder and the German
co-inmates, the Kapo, who serve them for an additional piece of bread, walk
among us.
Many despair under the exhausting work performed in privation. Death by
heart attack strikes a lot, ending all suffering quickly, kindly. Here the burial
of the dead consists of the simple fact that the dead end up in the pits prepared
for the cables. They throw soil on top of them, then they place a cable, and fi-
nally they pour the concrete. Now, after eight days, I already know what the
commander meant during his address when referring to concrete. I also know
that about 100,000 deportees met their death here, and [that this has been]
their cemetery since the beginning of construction work, from 1942 until to-
day.
It’s a cold, rainy morning. Our foremen and our guards at the plant run eve-
rywhere around the workplaces, they seek shelter in the erected barracks,
well-heated against the moisture penetrating to the bones, against the cold and
the rain. Certainly the glowing iron stove gives off a nice warmth.[144] The
bright, white lamps shine a cozy light all around. We work near a hut, and we
watch them through the window: they take a hot tea and smoke their cigarettes
with pleasure. Meanwhile, the cheerful conversation continues, and some
laughter even reaches my ears.
Kommando 197 does not do its specialty if it’s raining. We don’t transport
concrete to load the concrete mixers, because the powdered concrete would
get wet and would be useless. However, for the detainees there is no bad
weather! In the concentration camp one cannot sit around idly, so we push the
sand tippers. With great care, each one puts on his back, under the striped
work jacket, a piece of paper from discarded cement bags to protect us from
the torrential rain. The big shovel moves quickly in our hands. The tipper fills
up quickly. We rush with this, because at the unloading site we can rest a
while, until on the only track arrives the train of […illegible].
We hold the full tipper back with our shoulders. Certainly, we would let it go
rather than hold it back on the inclined path. For a moment, it’s all right. But
suddenly the piece of wood pressed against the wheel escapes the hand of the
braker. The tipper begins to move like a sand tipper can move on a sloping
road. Our fear is huge. If they notice it, it will end badly. This is the I.G. Far-
ben’s construction site set up at the concentration camp... Pit and cable and
cement...[145] We hold on to the unleashed tipper with all our strength only
144
This scene took place in June 1944.
145
The threat of being buried in a pit with a cable laid on top.
[from behind], we pull at it from between the rails, between the temporarily
placed ties. We struggle in vain, until our comrade who had let the brake rod
slip out of his hands, with an imprudence resulting from fear or clumsiness,
jumps in front of the tipper that runs at increasing speed. He tries to stop it
with his arm. The desperate attempt fails. It was a clumsy act. An expert would
never have carried out his act. Only an inmate who, in civilian life, was a den-
tist. Only a concentration-camp prisoner can be so careless. The wagon hit
him. He fell to the ground. With a crunching sound, his leg gets shattered by
the iron wheels. The tipper turns upside down as well, and our unhappy com-
panion, in a state of beneficial unconsciousness, lies between the rails with his
bleeding leg, with cold sweat on his face, with an improbably pale face.[146]
We pull him out cautiously and lay him on the sandy ground. It’s raining cats
and dogs. We stand around him with dismay and consternation. In a concen-
tration camp, initiative or personal action don’t exist. It is forbidden to inter-
rupt the work without an order, and even more so to leave the workplace.
Out of the rain, two bright raincoats appear in our midst. They ask us why we
interrupted our work. One of them is an SS guard, the other a foreman. They
see him lying on the ground.
– Weiter machen [continue] – they order.
As they give the order to continue to work, they strangely realize that an in-
mate has his lower limbs completely smashed, and that the iron wagon full of
sand is turned upside down. In their cup there is probably still some hot tea
that steams; for them, the pouring rain is a torment. They hurry back to the
warm hut. The motionless body, the extraordinarily pale face, the bloody legs
remind me of the doctor from the obscurity of my past. Every Kommando at
the workplace knows the black sign indicating in which direction and how far
away the nearest first-aid station is from the work site. There are countless
signs of this kind at the Monowitz work site, as required by the safety regula-
tions for construction work.”
Nyiszli identified himself as a physician in order to assist the injured, and
asked for permission to take him to the emergency room.
An SS soldier comes towards me.
– You’re just a filthy, arrogant concentration-camp prisoner here, not a doc-
tor. You’re an arrogant guy; you do not even know that first aid and air raid
shelters are available only to the Germans of the Reich.
He began to scream.
– Do not steal time, because ... you will find out about it immediately! [i.e.:
you will have a bad experience].
We already know what he alludes to: 25 lashes in the presence of the doctor. I
think about it. We can get back to work at a slow pace, for the smoking ban,
but also for this cement paper bag that we put on our shoulders. The thing
happened on the Appelplatz after the return. The lashes were meted out by the
146
concentration camp’s official executioner. An SS doctor was present at the

punishment, but he often had to establish that death had occurred. Death was
caused by the contusion either of the kidneys or of the lumbar vertebrae. The
fact is that the number of blows was absolutely not in compliance with the ar-
ticle of the concentration camp regulations about corporal punishment, be-
cause one can count them up to 40; the number of lashes was never less when
I was an eyewitness of the event.
We put the overturned wagon back onto the rails. We pick up the shovels, and
the work continues. It does not seem to be 6 o’clock, meaning 6 pm, but we feel
like it; we have worked until eternity when we suspend the work. Our compan-
ion arrived on a stretcher made of boards, unconscious due to pain and loss of
blood. Our Kommando joins the others, and we walk to our lodgings at the
concentration camp. The evening roll call, which lasts 2 hours, is not much for
us either. They write down the number of our injured comrade, and he finally
is sent to the hospital, to the famous H.K.B., Häftlingskrankenbau. I already
expect that here they will amputate both legs under the knees with wonderful
surgical technique. Meanwhile they test on him some new narcotics of I.G.
Farben and other medicines. As soon as his leg stumps heal ‘per primam’ [by
first intention; meaning almost unscarred] his medical record will be filed
away, while he himself goes to the transport for the crematorium. For the I.G.
Farben he, the amputatee, is nothing but an ‘unnützer Esser’ [useless eater],
but in the Third Reich, these must die.
– These would be my arguments – I concluded – about the treatment reserved
for the prisoners of I.G. Farben.
The prosecutors confabulate, argue a bit, the chief prosecutor Minskoff stands
up and declares:
– The hearing’s morning session has come to an end. We will continue at
3.30pm in the afternoon.”147
At 15:30, Minskoff announced: “The interrogation of the witness Dr. Nyiszli
Miklos continues.”
“Forced labor, hunger, the cold, the appeals that last for hours, the long
marches and the continuous disruption of the night’s rest for weeks also broke
down the prisoner who arrived here in the best physical conditions.
After the evening roll call, in front of the reception office of the hospital bar-
rack, there is a large crowd. A group of men in ragged striped uniforms.
Poles, French, Hungarians, Greeks, Czechs. Half of Europe is represented
here. Every face on which I lay my gaze had contracted the typical disease of
the concentration camp, the sycosis parasitaris [recte: parasitic], the beard’s
fungus with its oozing blotches. A few days after arrival, it hits everyone. They
are not here for this. Here they wait to be examined [by the doctor] for injuries
caused on the job – an open and also dirty wound on the face, on a hand, on a
foot – diarrhea, dysentery, abdominal typhus at every stage. They sit quietly,
147
folded in on themselves, or stand in front of the entrance, numbed by apathy,

their gaze lost into infinity. As if the door opened in the Third Reich, and only
one step separated them from the door. They would cling even to a twig with
one finger.”
Medical treatment, a few weeks of rest, continued Nyiszli, could cure prison-
ers in most cases, but a disease was recognized as such only starting at a fever
of 39 degrees centigrade (102.2°F). Only such inmates received ambulatory
treatment who had first- and second-degree frostbite, jaundice free of inflam-
mation of the bladder, abscesses, carbuncles. Getting two days of “Schonung”
(rest) was already a lot. The inmates who benefited from it were assigned to
the camp maintenance service, which was responsible for removing rubbish,
cleaning the camp streets, and distributing the rations of bread. This office
was called “Lageraufbau”148 [camp construction]. Nyiszli also managed to get
two days of “Schonung,” because the long marches in bad shoes had wounded
his feet, and the wounds had become infected; hence he was assigned with an-
other inmate to transport the bread.149 He recounts:
“My companion walks slowly between the front poles of the bread crate. I
knew he suffered from long-standing heart insufficiency, so we did not hurry.
We carried the crate to the rhythm of a funeral procession, and often made our
way from the warehouse to the barracks and from the barracks to the ware-
house. It was already dark, and the outlines of the barracks faded in the damp
humid fog.
Suddenly the crate stops. My companion drops his poles rather than put them
down. In the dim light I cannot see his face distinctly; I only hear his husky
voice:
– I’ve had enough of this!
– Me too – I reply.
I do not believe that he heard my answer, because immediately a deep rattle
erupts from his lungs, and he falls to the ground while half way turning
around. A few more fragmentary, incomprehensible words, contorted as if he
had been hit on the head, and it’s the end. That’s how overworked work horses
croak, still bridled between the poles of their cart.”150
In the subsequent paragraph titled “An old memory,” Nyiszli reports about the
visit of a pharmaceutical representative from I.G. Farben in his medical office
in Hungary. The scene then moves abruptly to Birkenau:
“The Vistula, like a snaking line here and there, marks the edge of the world
outside of the barbed wire. What is inside the barbed wires is Birkenau. A
birch grove and a track laid without any railway equipment ending in its vicin-
ity.
148
The various units of “cleaners” (Reiniger) were part of the Aufräumungskommando (tidying-up
unit).
149
Világ, May 1, 1948, Part 12, p. 6.
150
Világ, May 4, 1948, Part 13, p. 6.
Thus abandoned, it reveals nothing to the observers. Neither the grove could
conceal it nor the fog could whirl around continuously, and it would not even
be possible to see anything from Birkenau. But one cannot even see the four
huge buildings that line up next to each other, nor could one see the strangely
shaped chimneys.[151]
One can see the swirling smoke that veils the sky over a grove like a black
cloud. It’s only for a moment, because a column of flames immediately breaks
out like a flaming fountain in the dark. The second, third, fourth column of
flames erupts as well. Four columns of fire slowly come together, devour the
fog and devour the piece of sky above me. Only the rails laid on the Birkenau
ramp, without a sign of a train, shine and stand out even [more] in the flashes
of intense light. This is the area of the crematoria and the fog lit by the fire,
and the smoke rises into the air like bloody foam.
I’ve lived here for four months, if I could calculate with the calendar. But for a
long time I don’t have a sense of time anymore. I do not live ‘in time’ but ‘in
space.’ I do not even have a sense for the horrors of which I have been an
eyewitness until now. The fires have been burning here for a long time. A lot of
water flows down the Vistula, and many millions of men alight here from the
trains.
I am the ‘doctor’ of the Auschwitz crematoria. Underground are the gas
chambers, on the ground floor the long row of cremation furnaces. On the
second floor, the lodgings of the Sonderkommando, the commando of the liv-
ing dead. In the air smoke and flames. In these flames there are the souls of
millions [of people] who fly away.”
Then Nyiszli suddenly relates a story about the visit of an I.G.-Farben repre-
sentative.152 After that he presents another story about Auschwitz titled “A
mysterious chief engineer”:
“The cremation furnaces of Auschwitz and their equipment were built in a fac-
tory of the time, near the company Topf and Sons of Munich. This name was
on the doors of the 60 furnaces of the crematoria of Auschwitz, on the auto-
matic ash-extraction devices, and also on parts of the mechanism of the air-
draft register.[153] With metal letters welded in a legible way.
Once this company sent a specialist to overhaul the devices in the crematoria.
He was a person of about 60 and wore the uniform of an SS Oberscharführer.
Being a concentration-camp inmate already knowledgeable in these matters, I
realized that this man had been wearing the uniform only since recently. He
moved in it in a strange, unusual way. The uniform did not even suit him well.
He did not even know where to put the heavy revolver hanging from his belt; it
was an impediment to him. His age and all his behavior revealed that the SS
151
152
Világ, May 5, 1948, Part 14, p. 4.
153
Perhaps an allusion to the pressurized-air device (Druckluftanlage) which stood next to each of
the three 3-muffle furnaces of Crematoria II and III. See Section 3.2.3.
uniform served him only to be able to move freely in the concentration camp
and to disguise himself as a person.
I conversed with him several times. In my opinion, he was an engineer dressed
as an SS [man] as a member of the big factory Topf and Sons, Munich, who
had installed the crematorium.
It is also probable that staff members of the I.G. Farben walked around in the
main camp and in the crematoria concealing their identity under the SS uni-
form.
*
The director of the hearing announces that the testimony of the witness contin-
ues the next morning at 9.00.”154
“The next day…
All take a seat in the audience hall. They read the names of the witnesses and
of the defendants present. Today there are also defense witnesses. In a place
reserved for the defense sit two well-dressed gentlemen. One is Dr. Wagner,
head of the Mannheim branch of I.G. Farben. The other is Dr. Stössel, head of
the profit sharing company[155] of I.G. Farben of Berlin.
– Minskoff: Doctor Wagner!
– Dr. Wagner: Here I am!
– Your residence?
– I live in Frankfurt.
– How old are you?
– Fifty.
– Your profession?
– From 1937 until the defeat I was director of the so-called GG., Umleitungs-
stelle 9.
A dramatic dialogue follows. A dramatic hearing.
– Minskoff: Dr. Wagner! GG. means Giftgas, poison gas.
– Dr. Wagner: Yes.
– Minskoff: The Umleitungsstelle 9, however, was a liaison office for I.G. Far-
ben, but also for the armed forces and the RSHA office, i.e. the inspec-
torate[156] [sic] of security of the Reich, one of its largest offices.
– Dr. Wagner: Yes.
– Minskoff: We know that subordinate to this office were the SIPO, the Gesta-
po, the SS, the SD and the SA, as well as Section IV.[157] We know that the lat-
ter also dealt with matters concerning the concentration camps. During the
hearing we do not want to dwell on all types of gas; we deal thoroughly with
another type of gas.”
154
Világ, May 6, 1948, Part 15, p. 4.
155
“Érdekeltség,” “profit sharing.”
156
RSHA: Reichsicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office; Inspectorate = Inspektion, for in-
stance “Inspektion der Konzentrationslager,” Inspectorate of the Concentration Camps.
157
SA and SS were troops, not offices, of the RSHA; “Section IV” was Abteilung IV, which was the
Gestapo.
Minskoff then asked Wagner what he knew about “Cyclon A” and “Cyclon
B,” to which the witness answered:
“Messrs. prosecutors! I myself, as I said, was a head of department. Through
my office, only documents for requesting and allocating various gases have
passed. As I mentioned, the Cyklon gases were not part of the group of combat
gasses, but of the so-called hygienic gasses. A strong disinfestant like chlorine.
I am not able to report on their chemical composition, because they were so-
called Geheimmittel [secret means], and even in the chemical department only
some chemical chiefs knew their composition.”
The witness was dismissed, and Minskoff called the witness Stössel.
“– Minskoff: What can you tell us about the types of Cyclon gas?
– Dr. Stössel: Messrs. Chief Prosecutors, Messrs. prosecutors! I knew the
types of Cyclon gas. To the best of my knowledge, the health departments of
both the armed forces and the labor service required it in large quantities for
disinfestation purposes.
– Minskoff: What do you know about their real purpose in the concentration
camps?
– Dr. Stössel: In this regard I cannot say anything, because no news about the
events of the concentration camps reached the outside.
Even if I had run into some uncontrollable rumor, on the one hand I would not
have believed it, on the other it would not have been prudent to investigate its
authenticity.”
Minskoff dismissed this witness as well, after which it was Nyiszli’s turn.
“The witness [Stössel] went back to his seat, and the chief prosecutor called
me.
– Dr. Nyiszli Miklos, what can you tell us about the types of Cyclon gas?
– Mr. Prosecutor! As a doctor, I am unable to account for as secret a composi-
tion as the chemical composition of these two types of gas. However, I am able
to provide a precise description of the use and effect of the types of gas as an
eyewitness to an event. I came to know two ways to use the Cyclon gas types. I
have witnessed the emptying of green, enameled tin cans of a volume of about
one liter into the disinfestation chamber of Camp F at Birkenau. They poured
down the contents of the cans through chimney-like openings onto clothes and
blankets piled up in the hermetically sealed disinfestation chamber [that was]
here in the hospital camp.”158
“After waiting for about 2 hours, the electric fans cleared the room of the gas.
The staff of the clothing warehouse distributed the clothes to the naked prison-
ers waiting in front of the premises. I had an opportunity to read the inscrip-
tion of these cans. The text of the inscriptions was as follows: Cyclon A. Ver-
tilgungsmittel für Läuse und andere Ungeziehfer [sic]. Vorsicht. Gift! (Pest
158
Világ, May 8, 1948, Part 16, p. 4.
control agent for lice and other pests. Caution: Poison!). I saw this in section
F of the Birkenau Camp!
With your permission, I quote literally from my book on Auschwitz the second
use [of gas].”
This is followed by the description of the homicidal “gassing” of his book’s
Chapter VII, where Nyiszli says that “Cyclon” was chlorine-based. Then he
comments:
“I saw this in the crematoria of Auschwitz. Countless times, during my eight-
months’ imprisonment. The gas cans were the same, both in appearance and
in color, and their inscriptions were the same. Only one letter was different on
the two gas cans. The gas cans used in the crematoria were inscribed with
Cyklon B instead of Cyklon A. More rarely they also used cans without writ-
ing. In these, in my opinion, there was chlorine.
By comparing my modest chemical knowledge and my experience of patholog-
ical and forensic anatomy with the phenomena that appeared in thousands of
bodies of dead who died of gas, I made the following assessment: death oc-
curred in a state of unconsciousness due to paralysis of the respiratory center,
depending on the weather (in rainy, humid weather, there is more oxygen in
the air) in 2-5 minutes.
External phenomena are:
Strong swelling of the head, edema (oedema).
Bluish-lilac complexion of the whole body, cyanosis.
Hemorrhage of the conjunctiva of the eye (hemorrhage conjuctivalis).
A fourth important phenomenon of cyanide poisoning is the dilatation of the
pupil (mydriasis).
My assessment of the chemical composition of the gas referred to as Cyclon B:
it is a chemical combination of acidum hydrocianatum [hydrogen cyanide],
chlorine and in all probability nitrogen in a way whose chemical formula is
unknown to me.
Its dry protective substance[159] is calcium silicate. Stabilizing[160] it in this
substance in a hermetically sealed can, it can be stored for a long time.[161]
The toxic substance, at the moment of the actual contact with air – probably
absorbing its oxygen – becomes gaseous from the solid state and fills the
available space very quickly (light gas), leaving the supporting substance un-
changed in its external appearance.”
The narration continues with a paragraph headlined “22,000 people a day.”
159
“védőanyaga.” In the transcription of this passage which was published in the 1964 edition of
Nyiszli’s book, the term used here is “vivőanyaga” instead – carrier substance.
160
“Suspendava,” non-existing verb in Hungarian, perhaps created by Nyiszli from the German and
English root word “suspend”; the meaning is unclear.
161
In the 1964 edition of Nyiszli’s book, the text was modified as follows: “In essence there is a
hermetically sealed stabilizer in the can, which can be stored for a long time.”
“Mr. prosecutors! Many times I had the opportunity to hold these granules in
my hand and examine them after the gassing was over.”162
“Chief Prosecutor Minskoff:
– How many cases did you witness, sir?”
– I was a detainee at the crematoria for eight months. If I consider that about
22,000 people went into the gas chambers every day, if I also consider that the
crematoria were not working every day (repairs, cleaning, etc.), then, all told,
during the period of my imprisonment I was a witness to the death by gas of
about 2 million people.
When telling of these things, a murmur runs throughout the entire room until
its end. There are many who understand German, but the murmur is repeated,
and after a few seconds there is a great movement among the audience, when
they translate it into English.
I see journalists taking notes excitedly. I see the judges take off their head-
phones and talk to one other. Only the defendants sit with indifference, as if all
this did not concern them.
I tell these things in relation to points 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the indictment, in the
file number U.S. AGO D. 4325.36. The blue light bulb goes out on my table. I
turn around to sit down in my place.”
Another paragraph is inserted into his story headlined “The extermination of
children”:
“Chief Prosecutor Minskoff takes the floor again.
– Esteemed court! Messrs. prosecutors! This observation is important in rela-
tion to the testimony given by the witness. The testimony given by the witness
for the prosecution Dr. Miklós Nyiszli fully agrees with both the technical im-
plementation of the extermination and the large number [of the victims], even
with the deposition made before us by Hauptsturmführer Höss. In this regard
there are the documents: Transcript p. 7821 and Transcript p. 7822, authenti-
cated affidavits.
SS Hauptsturmführer Höss was commander of the Auschwitz Concentration
Camp from 1 May 1940 to 1 December 1943. According to his deposition,
2,500,000 people were killed in the gas chambers in this period, and 500,000
died as a result of torture, hard work, hunger and disease. I read extracts from
two documents.
Transcript p. 7821:[163]
‘we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming trans-
ports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who
would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work
were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination
plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason
162
Világ, May 9, 1948, Part 17, p. 6.
163
This is followed by a Hungarian translation of a part of Point 7 of Höss’s affidavit of April 5,
1946, PS-3868, which I give here as a translation of the original German text.
of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made
over Tremblinka was that at Tremblinka the victims almost always knew that
they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the vic-
tims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course,
frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and
difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children
under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the chil-
dren in to be exterminated.’
Thus says Höss’s deposition. Now – Chief Prosecutor Minskoff continued – I
read Transcript p. 7822:[164]
‘It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending
upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their
screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened
the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special
commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the
corpses.’”165
Nyiszli’s tale continues with his Chapter VIII, which is headlined “The sterili-
zation of three hundred young women.” Minskoff asked him:
“Dr. Nyiszli, what do you know about the human experiments that SS doctors
carried out with medicines or Röntgen rays,[166] as well as in the operating
room or otherwise?”
The witness answered by talking about experiments carried out by Dr. Thilo
and Dr. Wolff.
“On the defendants’ bench sat Dr. Thilo, the deputy of Dr. Mengele of the
Auschwitz extermination camp.”
According to Nyiszli, Dr. Thilo was sometimes also present on the ramp, but
was mainly occupied with surgical work. Dr. Thilo worked in the well-
equipped surgery room in the hospital of the camp’s Sector F, but did not
work to save the lives of the inmates. He was very skilled in the use of medi-
cines and narcotics, at asepsis and antisepsis, carried out a masterly work with
the specialists assigned to him, SS doctors and inmate doctors. He experi-
mented with narcotics, the medicines sent by IG-Farben, perfected the surgical
methods and introduced new risky methods. In many cases there were also 10-
12 successful interventions a day. Then the doctors removed the stitches from
the operated prisoners and painstakingly recorded the illness and the medical
operations performed on the medical record. The patient, after a successful
operation and a careful and cordial treatment, received the ration due to him
the following day, following the concentration camp regulations.
164
This passage is taken from Point 6 of PS-3868.
165
Világ, May 11, 1948, Part 18, p. 4.
166
German term for x-rays.
“Half an hour later, he passed through the door of one of the crematoria with
his SS escorts. Within a few minutes, he lay dead with his eyes wide open on
the cement of the cremation hall, with a 6-mm lead bullet in his head.
This was the surgical activity of Hauptsturmführer Dr. Thilo in the hospital
barracks of Sector F field of the Birkenau Camp. I was an eyewitness of these
cases several times.”
This was followed by a description of Dr. Wolff’s activities:
“Another doctor sitting there on the defendants’ bench, Obersturmführer Dr.
Wolff, was the primary internist at the Birkenau Concentration Camp. Thou-
sands and tens of thousands [of prisoners] died of a disease. What was the dis-
ease? Diarrhea.”
Dr. Wolff, continued Nyiszli, also omitted the most basic medical intervention
that would have prevented the mass perishing of prisoners. Had he put salt in-
to the prisoners’ food, this simple measure would have decreased the number
of diseases. A liter of 5% hydrochloric-acid solution would have healed diar-
rhea sufferers from all sections of the camp within a few days. The cost of this
one-liter solution was only 1 Reichsmark.167 Just as Dr. Thilo, Dr. Wolff also
carried out research work. He studied with great care the course of various
species of diarrhea, and even sent the corpses of 150 diarrhea victims to the
dissection room of Crematorium I (II in today’s numbering).
Next, Nyiszli brought up Dr. Eduard Wirths, who had been SS garrison physi-
cian (SS-Standortarzt) at Auschwitz with the rank of SS Sturmbannführer:
“Messrs. prosecutors! A third SS physician sits here on the defendants’ bench!
Dr. Wirts [sic]. I can also report on his activity. His complete rank [was]: ‘SS
Hauptsturmbannführer Dr. Wirts’ [sic].”
His sphere of activity was the “Experimental Barracks No. 10.” Three hundred
young women were sterilized with X-rays in this building, Nyiszli claimed.168
Then Minskoff asked Nyiszli the following question:
“Dr. Nyiszli! What observations did he make, as a physician, on the mental
disposition of the Nazi murderers?”
Nyiszli spoke of his contacts with SS members in the crematoria, in particular
with Oberscharführer Mussfeld, with whom he had frequent conversations.
Once he asked Mussfeld with what right the SS exterminated the Jews, and in
his Chapter IX (“A massacring pastry chef”) he even reported an alleged an-
swer in German:169
“Well... I give you an answer! The Führer gives us the right to do it. And in a
National-Socialist sense, killing Poles and Jews isn’t even murder. It is the sa-
cred assassination!”
167
Világ, May 12, 1948, Part 19, p. 4.
168
Világ, May 13, 1948, Part 20, p. 4.
169
Világ, May 14, 1948, Part 21, p. 4.
In Crematorium I (II of today’s numbering), Nyiszli reports, there was also

“the painter D. Olleé” (David Olère) who drew illustrated postcards that were
ordered, among others, by Oberscharführer Seitz. Nyiszli describes him this
way:
“D. Olleé was a stoker at the 15th cremation furnace of Crematorium 1 during
the day shift, and during the night shift he shoveled coke under the corpses of
thousands of people. […] The 15th furnace is the last of the row of sinisterly
aligned furnaces in the cremation hall. Here, at the end of the great hall, D.
Olleé shovels the coke.”
Nyiszli then provides other information not contained in his book:170
“The sector of the Birkenau Camp, the infamous ‘Menschenlager’ [meaning
male camp], consisted of 32 barracks. 32,000 detainees are kept inside a fence
charged with 6,000 volts. The inmates of the camp are divided into 40 Kom-
mandos. The S.K. (Strafkommando) [penal unit] and Z.K. (Zerlegkommando)
[dismantling unit] were the two who had the force majeure.”
Then he elaborates on the tasks of the various Kommandos.171 In Chapter XI
(“Without Defendants”) Nyiszli lists four Auschwitz criminals who had not
yet been put on trial:
“1. Together with a non-commissioned officer, an SS captain of the health ser-
vice brings the gas cans to the crematoria with a luxury Red Cross vehicle.
During the gassing operation, he controls the emptying of the cans into the
chimneys that are used to spread out the gas granules. 3,000 who are sen-
tenced to extermination await their death in the gas chamber. The SS captain
for some reason shakes off his contemplative calmness and impatiently snarls
at the non-commissioned officer:
– Gib schon schneller das Fressen den Juden! [Make haste giving the Jews
their fodder!].”
This captain was not Dr. Mengele, whom Nyiszli names later as a third crimi-
nal.172
“Prosecutor” von Halle authenticated Nyiszli’s declaration and gave a copy
of it to the other prosecutors and to the defendants, and attached this note to it
(I quote Nyiszli’s text with all the errors):
“Sworn to and signed before me this 8th day of October 1947 as known by the
person making the above affidavit. Benvenuto Van Halle, U. C. Civilian Agv
D. 43.2532.
This was the file reference number.”
Nyiszli then launches into a general exposition on the Third Reich from the
sources indicated earlier; among other things, he says:173
170
Világ, May 15, 1948, Part 22, p. 4.
171
Világ, May 16, 1948, Part 23, p. 6.
172
Világ, May 19, 1948, Part 24, p. 4.
173
Világ, May 20, 1948, Part 25, p. 4.
“I.G. Farben delivered thousands and hundreds of thousands of Cyclon cans.

The gas went to Majdanek, to Treblinka and to the place of greatest consump-
tion, to Auschwitz.”
This is followed by more irrelevant historical-philosophical digressions. At
the end, Nyiszli tells us that he learned only after having written his book that
there were other companions of misfortune:
“Dr. Körner József, physician, Nice, France, dissection room of Crematorium
I.
Prof. Dr. Lewy Robert, Strasbourg, France, Barracks No. 12 of Camp F.
Prof. Dr. Epstein A., Prague, Experimental Barracks No. .10.
Dr. Bendel József, Paris, physician of the Kommando of Crematorium I.
Bennamia Daniel, Athenian, Athens, rue Sokrates 8, stoker of Crematorium I.”
Three of these had already testified “before the Nuremberg court.”174 Of these,
only Bennamia is not named in Nyiszli’s book. The detainees who had already
testified – at the I.G. Farben trial, as we will see – were Epstein and Bendel;
no one knows who the third is and where he testified, if at all.
2.2.3. Nyiszli at Nuremberg: The Affidavit of October 8, 1947

As is well known, the Nuremberg Trial, in English called “Trial of the Major
War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal” (IMT), unfolded at
Nuremberg between November 14, 1945, and October 1, 1946. After its con-
clusion, the Americans staged 12 more trials on their own accord as follows:
I – “Karl Brandt, et al.” (The Medical Case)
II – “Erhard Milch” (The Milch Case)
III – “Josef Altstoetter, et al.” (The Justice Case)
IV – “Oswald Pohl, et al.” (The Pohl Case)
V – “Friedrich Flick, et al.” (The Flick Case)
VI – “Carl Krauch, et al.” (The I.G. Farben Case)
VII – “Wilhelm List, et al.” (The Hostage Case)
VIII – “Ulrich Greifelt, et al.” (The RuSHA Case)175
IX – “Otto Ohlendorf, et al.” (The Einsatzgruppen Case)
X – Alfred Krupp, et al. (The Krupp Case)
XI – “Ernst von Weizsaecker, et al. “ (The Ministries Case)
XII – “Wilhelm von Leeb, et al. Procedure” (The High Command Case)
The I.G. Farben Trial, properly called “United States of America v. Carl
Krauch et al.,” was staged from August 14, 1947 to July 30, 1948. Initially,
the defendants were 24 top managers of the I.G. Farbenindustrie AG: Carl
Krauch, Hermann Schmitz, Georg von Schnitzler, Fritz Gajewski, Philipp
Heinrich Hörlein, August von Knieriem, Fritz ter Meer, Christian Schneider,
174
Világ, May 22, 1948, Part 27, p. 4.
175
Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, SS Race and Settlement Main Office.
Otto Ambros, Max Brüggemann, Ernst Bürgin, Heinrich Bütefisch, Paul

Häfliger, Max Ilgner, Friedrich Jähne, Hans Kühne, Carl Lautenschläger,
Wilhelm Mann, Heinrich Oster, Karl Wurster, Walter Dürrfeld, Heinrich Gat-
tineau, Erich von der Heyde, Hans Kugler.
The charges against Max Brüggemann were dropped due to reasons of
health. The “Prosecution Counsel” consisted of the following individuals:
– Chief of Counsel: Brigadier General Telford Taylor
– Deputy Chief Counsel: Mr. Josiah E. DuBois Jr.
– Chief I.G. Farben Trial Team: Mr. Drexel A. Sprecher
– Associate Counsel: Mr. Morris Amcham, Mr. Jan Charmatz, Mrs. Mary
Kaufman, Albert G.D. Lewy, Mr. Emanuel Minskoff, Mr. Randolf Newman,
Mr. Virgil van Street.
The proceedings of the I.G.-Farben Trial (English edition) consist of 43
volumes with a total of 15,834 pages of hearing transcripts, and moreover
2,300176 prosecution documents (“Prosecution Exhibits”).177
Nyiszli claims to have attended precisely this trial.
Friedrich Herber, in the short text “The Life of Dr. Miklós Nyiszli,” which
appears in the appendix to the 1992 German edition of Nyiszli’s 1946 book,
reproduces the Hungarian doctor’s writ of summons as issued by the “Office
of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes U.S. Army” dated October 9, 1947 (but
this must read September) and signed by a major Milton A. Sewell. Point 1 of
it reads (Nyiszli 1992, p. 184; see Document 4):
“To: Nyiszli Nicolaus (Romanian)
1. Verbal order of Commanding General authorizing and inviting above
named individual to proceed on or about 25 Sept 47 from Str. Vlahutz # 44
Oradea, Roumania to Nurnberg, Germany for a period of thirty (30) days to
appear as Voluntary Witness at Nurnberg Trials, is hereby confirmed and
made of record the exigencies of the matter having been such as to preclude
the issuing of orders in advance. Upon completion of duty individual will re-
turn to Oradea, Roumania.”
Nyiszli actually went to Nuremberg, where he submitted to Benvenuto von
Halle, “U.S. Civilian AGO D432532 Office of Chief of Counsel for War
Crimes U.S. War Department,” the following German-language affidavit on
October 8, 1947, which became Prosecution Document NI-11710 (see Docu-
ment 5 & 5a):
176
The highest number on the list of documents is 2,354, but no documents bear the numbers 2271-
2299.
177
National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, Record Group 238.5.3 Offi-
cial Records of the Trials before U.S. Military Tribunals. In microfilm: National Archives Micro-
film Publications, Microfilm Publication M892, Rolls 1-5 & 16-35, Washington, 1976.
Declaration under Oath

I, Dr. Nyiszli Nikolae, physician, residing at Oradia-Mare, Str. Vlahuta 44,
Romania, born on June 17, 1901 in Simleul-Silvaniai,
after I have been made aware that I am liable to prosecution due to a false
declaration, I hereby declare under oath, voluntarily and without compulsion
the following:
1) Until my arrest on May 15, 1944, I worked as a regional district medical
practitioner. On May 19-20[178] 1944, I went with a large transport from Hun-
gary to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. There I was deloused, my belong-
ings were taken away, and I received a new inmate suit. On May 20-21[179]
1944, I went to Monowitz, the concentration camp of the IG-Farben factory
Auschwitz. At Monowitz we were again deloused, the new inmate clothes were
taken away from us, and we received old and torn inmate suits. The next day I
was in the quarantine tent. The following day I was assigned to Block 8, Con-
crete Kommando 179,[180] to work at the IG-Farben construction site. After
about 2 weeks came the order that doctors (pathologists) no longer had to
leave for work with the Kommandos. We two doctors were taken to Birkenau,
Field F, Block 12. There we were deloused and received civilian clothes from
others. Shortly afterwards, SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Mengele ordered me to
work in the crematorium of Birkenau as a pathologist.
On January 18 1945, in the course of the evacuation of the Birkenau Camp, I
was taken to Mauthausen. From there I was transported to Melk/Danube. In
early April 1945 I came to Ebensee, where I was liberated by the Americans
on May 5 while being seriously ill.
2) Upon arrival at Monowitz on May 20-21, 1944, – as I said, we were about
6,000 detainees – a speech was given. We were told that we were in the con-
centration camp of the IG-Farbenindustrie at Monowitz and that we were here
not to live but to croak in the concrete. I did not know what the word concrete
meant. After a couple of days, I found out from older detainees that on the IG-
Farben construction site, especially at the cable units, 20-25 inmates had pre-
viously been shot or beaten to death during work. These detainees had been
thrown into the trenches that had been excavated for cables, and had been
covered with concrete. A larger number of detainees, especially from Breslau
and Berlin, is said to be lying underneath the concrete.
3) The engineers of IG-Farben split up the work among all the 200 detainee
units employed there at the I.G. construction site. They gave instructions to
foremen on the basis of drawings.
4) I was an eyewitness to several accidents at the construction site, even of the
most serious nature, where no first aid was provided. The sick or injured in-
mates had to remain lying at the construction site until all the units had re-
178
In the Hungarian text: May 19.
179
In the Hungarian text: May 20.
180
In the Hungarian text: 197.
turned, and only after the appeal, which sometimes lasted for hours, they were
brought to the inmates’ hospital.
5) It was generally known that after 3 to 4 weeks, if the sick did not heal, they
were put on a transport, that is, they were sent to be gassed at Birkenau or to
be shot at Birkenau.
6) When I was active in the Birkenau crematorium, I convinced myself in three
cases that transports numbering some 2-300 detainees from Monowitz went to
be gassed, hence inmates who had worked for IG-Farben. Even the SS men
talked openly about it.
7) The inmate transports from Monowitz sent to Birkenau for extermination
were not marked in any special way, because all transports destined for ex-
termination left their camp with utterly ragged clothes and shoes.
8) In my capacity as a pathologist in the Birkenau crematorium, I frequently
had to take over inmates killed in an accident on the IG-Farben grounds with
accompanying paperwork and had to dissect them. I had to compile precise
reports about the causes of death. With this seemingly lawful exactitude of tak-
ing care of the inmates in individual cases, the IG directors, in agreement with
the SS, wanted to conceal the traceless disappearance of thousands of detain-
ees.
9) After a completed gassing, I held Zyklon B granules in my hands. The green
enameled cans were brought on site with a Red-Cross car by an SS
Hauptsturmführer and an SDG, and thrown by them into the gas chambers.
After the cans had been emptied, they were washed with water by detainees
and carried away by the two persons mentioned first.
10) On the gassing of prisoners with Zyklon B in the underground gas cham-
bers of Birkenau I can say the following: According to my personal observa-
tions – I often had to carry away medicines and eye glasses from the dressing
room next to the gas chamber after searching the purses of those gassed – I
know that the doors were closed and the light was extinguished centrally, as
soon as the mass of people was in the gas chambers. At this time a black-
painted red-cross car arrived. An SS officer and an SDG alighted from the car.
They held 4 green enameled cans in their hands. They went to the small con-
crete chimneys that were covered with concrete lids and donned gas masks.
The cans were opened and the contents of the can – Zyklon-B in granular form
with pink-lilac color[181] – was thrown into the openings. The granules did not
spread out in the gas chamber because they fell down through perforated
pipes,[182] and they immediately released gas due to contact with the air.[183]
Since the gas granules fell on the floor, the gas developed first in the lower
layers of air and then gradually rose higher. This is how I explain that after
the termination of the gassing the corpses were not scattered out in the room
181
Also in the Hungarian text: “rózsaszin és lilás.”
182
In the Hungarian text: “lukacsos csöveken hullottak” – “they fell into perforated tubes.”
183
In the Hungarian text: “es levegővel való érin[t]kezés után azonnal gázt fejlesztettek” – “the gas
developed immediately after actual contact with air.”
but were lying in tower-shaped piles. The stronger ones probably threw the
weaker ones down, climbed on those lying below in order to prolong their life
by reaching [air] layers still free of gas. This way women, children, and the el-
derly usually ended up lying at the bottom. As a physician, the following diag-
nosis imposed itself: death by central respiratory paralysis.
11) I do not know any leading IG-Farben employees by name. A professor of
chemistry worked at Monowitz who must have been a leading individual of the
IG. However, leading IG individuals must have been aware of the extermina-
tion operation, because most of them lived in the town of Auschwitz, and the
fires of the crematoria and of the two open graves that burned day and night
could be seen up to a distance of 30 kilometers.[184]
12) There were often visits to the Auschwitz Main Camp, even to the cremato-
ria. But they [the visitors] always wore SS uniforms, so [they were] not known
[recognizable]. For example, the furnaces of the crematoria were provided by
the specialized factory Topf & Söhne. This name was cast[185] onto each oven.
On one occasion this factory sent a specialist to review the devices. He was a
man of at least 60 years. I exchanged a few words with him, in my opinion he
was an engineer in the uniform of an SS Oberscharführer. This way it was also
possible for IG people to show up at Auschwitz and to remain unrecognized.
13) Of the crematoria’s Sonderkommando, food carriers went to the Birkenau
Camp every day, where they – despite strict regulation – had continuous con-
tact with local prisoners. Thus, the crematoria’s activity was known to every
detainee.
I have carefully read and countersigned each of the five (5) pages of this
statement under oath, made the necessary corrections in my own handwriting,
and countersigned them with my initials, and declare herewith under oath
that, to the best of my knowledge and conscience, I have stated the absolute
truth in this statement.
[Signature]
Dr. Nyiszli Nikolae
[In English:] Sworn to and signed before me this 8th day of October 1947 at
Nuremberg by Nyiszly NIKOLAE,
known to me to be the person making the above affidavit.
[Signature]
BENVENUTO VON HALLE
U.S. Civilian AGO D432532
Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes
U.S. War Department”
184
In the Hungarian text: “krematóriumok kémenyeinek és a két nyitott maglya tüzei pedig Birke-
nautól 30 kilómeterre is látszottak és éjjel nappal égtek” – “the flames of the crematorium chim-
neys and of the two outdoor fires were still visible 30 km from Birkenau, and they burned night
and day.”
185
In the Hungarian text: “öntve,” cast.
2.2.4. Nyiszli’s “Testimony” at the I.G. Farben Trial: an Unheard

Imposture
Nyiszli’s participation in the I.G.-Farben Trial was actually limited to this af-
fidavit. His entire story about him testifying in court, Minskoff’s questions
and his answers, all this was completely invented. Nyiszli was never called to
the witness stand.
In his articles, as mentioned earlier, he even confuses the International Mil-
itary Tribunal at Nuremberg with the I.G. Farben Trial, and lists the judges
and prosecutors of both trials as if they had been one single trial. Not only
that, but he lets Minskoff state that Nyiszli showed up “in front of the Interna-
tional Military Tribunal”!
This false information misled the editor of the 1964 Hungarian edition of
Nyiszli’s book, who wrote that Nyiszli’s “interrogation was conducted by the
chief prosecutor E.E. Minskov [Minskoff] representing the Soviet Union,”
although Minskoff was merely a U.S. civil servant with the identification
number “AGO D 230991.”186 Misunderstanding Nyiszli’s intentionally convo-
luted references, the same editor wrote (Nyiszli 1964, p. 196.):
“According to the author’s [Nyiszli’s] notes, the part of [his] testimony con-
cerning the actual treatment of sick inmates, the use of toxic gases and the ex-
periments performed on living persons are located in the procedural files with
the respective references U.S. AGO-D 4325.33, U.S. AGO-D 4325.36 and U.S.
AGO-D 4325.37.”
Friedrich Herber repeated this misinformation while adding further confusion.
After having received the summons mentioned earlier, Herber states, Nyiszli
went to Nuremberg in October 1947:187
“and put on record his knowledge about the treatment of the sick, the use of
toxic gas in the mass murder of people. According to his remarks, his state-
ments are written down in the files of the preliminary investigation (protocol
numbers U.S. AGO-D 4325.33, U.S. AGO-D 4325.36 and U.S. AGO-D
4325.37). A revised version [of the declarations] appeared in large newspa-
pers as a series titled ‘I was a witness at Nuremberg.’”
As mentioned earlier, reference numbers of this type did not at all refer to pro-
cedural files, but were the identification numbers of U.S. civil servants, in the
above case, “AGO D432532” referred to Benvenuto von Halle, while E.E.
Minskoff had the ID number “AGO-D 230991.”
Nyiszli claimed to have participated as a witness in 17 sessions of the I.G.
Farben Trial, but he never indicated the date of any of these sessions, nor the
186
On April 12, 1948 Minskoff signed an affidavit about Gerhard Peters which he signed precisely
with “E.E. Minskoff AGO D 230991.” NI-15124.
187
F. Herber, “Der Lebensweg des Dr. Miklós Nyiszli,” in: Nyiszli 1992, p. 185.
pages of the transcript where his testimony can be found. The few references
he made merely make his imposture even more obvious.
He reports Minskoff’s alleged interrogation of “Dr. Wagner,” who, Nyiszli
claims, testified “the next day,” hence right after Nyiszli’s testimony. Dr.
Hans Wagner testified indeed as a prosecution witness, although he had not
been questioned by Minskoff, but rather by Drexel A. Sprecher. The interro-
gation took place at the hearing on September 9, 1947.
A certificate produced by Charles D. Provan (to which I will return in Sec-
tion 5.2.2.) informs us that Nyiszli arrived in Nuremberg on October 3, 1947,
and that he was handled by Minskoff on behalf of Sprecher.188 It is therefore
clearly impossible for Nyiszli to have testified right before Dr. Wagner. Not
only that, but the whole dialogue of Wagner’s interrogation is, again, com-
pletely invented. Nyiszli even managed to mangle the name of the office
where Dr. Wagner had worked as a chemist from 1938 to 1945: it was not the
“GG department, Umleitungsstelle 9,” but the “Vermittlungsstelle W,” which
was the I.G Farbenindustrie’s liaison office to the Wehrmacht. Sprecher, in his
interrogation, never referred to toxic gases and in particular not to “Cyklon A”
and “Cyklon B.”189
Nyiszli also gave an excerpt from the alleged interrogation of a certain Dr.
Stössel, but no such person participated in the I.G. Farben Trial.
Another element of pure imagination is Minskoff’s supposed quotation of a
statement by Höss, for which Nyiszli gave as reference:
“Transcript p. 7821 and Transcript p. 7822, authenticated affidavits”
As mentioned earlier, the text of the two quoted excerpts belongs to the affi-
davit (Eidestattliche Erklärung) of the former Auschwitz commandant of
April 8, 1945, which was recorded as Document PS-3868 and read into the
IMT’s record during the session of April 15, 1946.190 The two page numbers
mentioned by Nyiszli refer to the official transcript of the IMT’s hearings as
summarized in the subsequently published volumes. Nyiszli puts in
Minskoff’s mouth the words “the deposition made before us by Hauptsturm-
führer Höss,” as if the former Auschwitz commandant had testified during the
I.G. Farben Trial. Document PS-3868 is contained in Book 82 of the prosecu-
tion’s documents (see Section 4.3.1.). Two more affidavits by Höss, dated
May 20, 1946 (Document NI-034, Exhibit 1424) and March 12, 1947 (NI-
4434, Exhibit 1293) were also introduced during the I.G. Farben Trial.
Telford Taylor was the only one who, during the I.G. Farben Trial, indi-
rectly mentioned PS-3868 by referring to the content of its Point No. 2 during
188
Provan 2001, p. 28. See Document 6.
189
Official Record. United States Military Tribunals Nürnberg. Case No. 6, Tribunal 6. U.S, vs Carl
Krauch et al. Volume 2, Transcript (English), pp. 549-576.
190
IMT, Vol. XI, pp. 414-418.
his opening speech at the hearing of August 14, 1947, yet without explicitly
mentioning the document:191
“In August 1941, the use of a lethal gas known as Zyclon B was tried experi-
mentally on a group of Russian officers at Auschwitz; the method proved high-
ly successful and Hoess proceeded to exploit it. This decision made Hoess fa-
mous as the most monstrous mass murderer in history. Special gas chambers
were erected at Birkenau and a series of crematoria were constructed to take
care of the corpses. Hoess himself estimated that at least 2,500,000 Auschwitz
inmates were executed in the gas chambers and exterminated in the cremato-
ria, and that another half million inmates died from starvation or disease. He
added that the total of three million represented about 70 or 80 percent of all
the persons who came to Auschwitz, and that the remainder were picked out
and used as slave workers for the industries located near the camp”
Nyiszli’s statements are even more bewildering than that, however, for he pre-
tended that Dr. Thilo and Dr. Wirths were present as defendants during the
I.G. Farben Trial:
“On the defendants’ bench sat Dr. Thilo, the deputy of Dr. Mengele of the
Auschwitz extermination camp.”
“A third SS physician sits here on the defendants’ bench! Dr. Wirts. I can also
report on his activity. His complete rank: ‘SS Hauptsturmbannführer Dr.
Wirts.’”
SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Heinz Thilo, who had been a camp physician (La-
gerarzt) in the Quarantine Camp (BIIa), the Gypsy Camp (BIIe) and Birke-
nau’s Hospital Camp (BIIf), died on May 13, 1945, hence it would have been
difficult for him to participate during the I.G. Farben Trial, which began over
two years later.
SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Eduard Wirths (for Nyiszli “SS Hauptsturmbann-
führer”) had served as Auschwitz garrison physician (SS-Standortarzt) from
September 1942 to January 1945 and committed suicide while incarcerated by
the British in September 1945, so his participation in the trial is equally ab-
surd.
Of course, it is also false that the International Military Tribunal had taken
a copy of Nyiszli’s book into the record. As a matter of fact, not the slightest
trace of Nyiszli’s book can be found in the Tribunal’s documentation; it was
not examined, and its veracity was not verified.
Considering the enormous historical importance that Nyiszli attributed to
his own book, it may well be that he took a copy of it along to Nuremberg.
But if that is so, one has to wonder not only why it wasn’t mentioned during
the trial, but also why Nyiszli wasn’t allowed to testify as a witness. The rea-
son is that his story was in blatant contradiction to the allegations that had al-
191
Krauch et al. Volume 2, Transcript (English), p. 176.
ready been evaluated by the prosecution, whose highlights regarding gassing

allegations were the reports published by the “War Refugee Board” in No-
vember 1944 as well as the testimonies of Pery Broad and Charles Sigismund
Bendel. I will return to this in Section 4.3.1.
Nyiszli claims to have attended the first hearing of the trial, when Minskoff
read a 16-point indictment into the record. Right after that, Minskoff allegedly
called Nyiszli into the witness stand.
In fact, however, the indictment, which consisted of only 5 points – 1) war
of aggression, 2) crimes against humanity through plunder and spoliation, 3)
crimes against humanity through slavery and mass murder, 4) membership in
a criminal organization (SS; only for three defendants), 5) common plan or
conspiracy against peace (NMT, Vol. 7, pp. 14-60) – was read into the record
during the first hearing on August 14, 1947 by General Taylor.192 As men-
tioned earlier, Nyiszli arrived at Nuremberg only on October 3, 1947.
Regarding his phantom deposition, Nyiszli provides a detail he had un-
doubtedly learned indirectly and incorrectly: there was an “electric blue light
bulb” in the witness stand which, when turned on and off, gave the signal of
the beginning and end of a testimony.
During the interrogation of Charles Sigismund Bendel, to whom Chapter
4.2. is devoted, Minskoff instructed the witness as follows:193
“Before you, there are two signal lights which are connected with the sound
system. It is necessary that there be a slight pause between questions and an-
swers, so that the English translation may be made. The yellow light, when it
is flashed, is an indication that you are going too rapidly and it is a request
that you slow down. The red light is a stop signal, and when it is flashed you
will stop completely and not resume your answers until you are notified.”
The bulbs therefore had different colors and different functions.
The narration contains further errors, which I mention briefly.
Birkenau’s male camp was not called “Menschenlager” but “Männer-
lager,” and as far as is known never accommodated 32,000 detainees. Based
on extant inmate labor-deployment records (Arbeitseinsatz), the maximum
strength of 23,286 inmates was reached on October 3, 1944. The number of
labor units (Kommandos) was not 40, but 77.194 Furthermore, “S.K.” did not
stand for Strafkommando, which did not exist, but rather for the Strafkompa-
nie (penal company). A “Zerleg[e]kommando” did not exist either, but rather a
group of inmates working for an armaments plant called “LW. Zerlegebetriebe
– Ost.”
The pertinent records reveal that from September 10, 1942 to February 23,
1943, 11,246 surgical interventions of various types were performed in the
192
Ibid., Vol. 1.
193
Ibid., Vol. 26, p. 9586.
194
APMO, D-AII/3a, pp. 91-93.
hospitals of the Auschwitz camp complex (Mattogno 2016c, p. 52). Nyiszli’s

claim that detainees, especially those who had suffered amputations, were
killed shortly afterwards since they were “useless eaters,” and for this reason
they had to die in the Third Reich, is a simple fairy tale like all the others. In
the various reports on the number of inmates and their labor deployment at the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp, the heading “inmates unfit for work and deploy-
ment” (Nicht arbeits- und nichteinsatzfähige Häftlinge) occurred invariably,
which included, among others, the entry “Invalids” (Invaliden). This entry ap-
pears in about seventy reports from January 15, 1944 to January 16, 1945.
From the end of July to September 7, there were between 132 and 148 invalids
in the male camp alone; on January 16, 1945, there were 400 of them (ibid.,
pp. 76f.).
Apparently none of the orthodox Holocaust historians ever bothered exam-
ining Nyiszli’s “testimony” published in the newspaper Világ, and none of
them therefore considered it important to check whether he had really testified
during the I.G. Farben Trial.
2.3. The Correspondence between Paul Rassinier and

Miklós Nyiszli
2.3.1. The Correspondence between Paul Rassinier and Albert Paraz
Albert Paraz (1899-1957), a French novelist and newspaper journalist, wrote
the foreword to the first, 1950 edition of Paul Rassinier’s book Le Mensonge
d’Ulysse (The Lie of Ulysses). Paraz maintained a friendly relationship with
the founder of historic revisionism until his own death. In the correspondence
between these two individuals, some letters deal specifically with Nyiszli. It
was Paraz who reported to Rassinier the references of the French press to the
Hungarian physician.
The following letters195 show that Paraz had a critical sense that was
somewhat unusual for the era. It should be noted, however, that the available
historical knowledge was very limited at that time, which has an impact on the
object of Paraz’s and Rassinier’s criticisms as well as on the quality of their
criticisms. The same is of course also true for Gerald Reitlinger, the most
prominent orthodox holocaust historian of the time, as a demonstrate in Chap-
ter 5.1.
The importance of this correspondence lies above all in the fact that it
shows how Rassinier’s interest in Nyiszli was born, and it exhibits the facts of
his letter exchange with him, which I will deal with in the next section.
Paraz to Rassinier, March 30, 1951
“My dear Rassinier,
I would like you to read in ‘France Soir’ of March 28, on page 2, ‘New in
medicine – The most terrible document of the half century’ – ‘A Hungarian
medical specialist miraculously surviving Auschwitz tells how the Nazis killed
6 million innocents’ – of Médicus.
This document, it seems, has ‘dispelled from now on all doubts.’ So there were
still any?
He claims to have seen 3,000 people come into a room that 10 minutes later
had to be completely stripped. – To be able to undress you must be at least[196]
4 per square meter, this room therefore measured 750 square meters, i.e. 20 m
x 37 m.[197] – Immediately behind it there was another one in which the naked
195
The letters’ text has been taken from: Archives Paul Rassinier 2016, pp. 346-351, 357, 369, 376,
395. Documentation on Nyiszli is in these Archives Paul Rassinier, archived at Bibliothèque de
documentation internationale contemporaine at Nanterre.
196
The text has “au moins” (at least), but from the context it should say “at most.”
197
These figures only serve to exemplify the size of the room. The alleged “undressing room” of the
Birkenau Crematoria II and III was 49.49 m long and 7.93 m wide; its surface area was therefore
392.5 m². See Chapter 3.3.
people who were killed in 5 minutes were admitted, but it was necessary to
start the ventilation apparatus 20 minutes later, and several hours later the
people entering the gas chamber to see the horrible spectacle, they are forced
to wear gas masks. All this seems to me really a very suspicious testimony es-
pecially for Auschwitz, where the witnesses say that there was no gas cham-
ber, it was in Birkenau.
You should perhaps write them, I cannot. You know that I am in conflict with
them for the Carmen affair, and I am not a specialist in the camps, but it seems
quite certain that this story is almost the story of a provocateur who persuades
the Germans that everything that has been said about the camps is a lie.”
Rassinier to Paraz, March 31, 1951
“[…] Seen in France-Soir, the history of the gas chambers. Most likely, this
guy did not see anything. He is in contradiction to the other deportees who say
that the gas chambers were based on the model of the shower rooms. And
then, at the rate of 3,000 people every ‘some hours,’ it must have taken some
time to asphyxiate 6 million people: this makes a year at least, without stop-
ping, night and day. I wait until I have read ‘Les Temps Modernes,’ which
published the original, to make up my mind.
We can already say:
1 °) – that the description of the gas chamber as the one he claims to have
seen is more in keeping with the reality than those given by other witnesses: he
complies at least with what are the disinfection chambers in the laundries;
2 °) – that there is at least one naivety: the aforesaid doctor claims that he
would have been killed if it had been known that they were killing with injec-
tions to the heart; yet one could not possibly think that he was unaware that
they were killing with gas, because he says he was sent to count the corpses...
3 °) – the other witnesses – except Kogon, who found only one witness and
moreover behind the iron curtain – claim that all the deportees who were in-
volved in the asphyxiation operations were eliminated by the SS;
4 °) – this guy – and he himself says so – belonged to the camp services, and
this alone makes him suspicious. [...]”
Paraz to Rassinier, April 11, 1951
“[…] Regarding the ‘France Soir’ affair, it is quite clear that if you calculate
just a little, you realize that it is all the more impossible that no deportee has
ever seen these chambers that had to measure at least 60 m by 30 m, and if it
was necessary to have all these corpses removed by people wearing a mask,
we need to reckon with at least two good teams of some ten musclemen, how
come these guys would not have spoken about it? But the legend is well rooted,
and in the correspondence of the days that followed it in F[rance]S[oir198]
there are letters from readers that find this perfectly logical.
198
That is, in the subsequent issues of the newspaper.
In my booklet I also talk about the legend of the devil and the subsequent dev-
ils, Franco, Hitler, Mikado, Joseph […].”
Rassinier to Paraz, April 12, 1951
“There is nothing serious anymore. The cook of Les Temps Modernes has not
even noticed that it would have taken the world, and lots of space, to construct
halls 200 meters in length, 8 of them, grouped in twos. He did not even see the
contradiction between 6,000,000 corpses during 5 years and 20,000 per day
[...] we live among madmen.”
“I sent these arguments to Les Temps Modernes. In my usual style and not on
the fly as for you. Of course, they will not take them into account.”
Paraz to Rassinier, April 14, 1951
“[…] Very good, your criticism of Nyiszli, but couldn’t you, in addition, be
amazed by this witness who comes 6 years later, who did not say anything at
Nuremberg. And to insinuate, to remain in the dialectic line dear to the ‘Temps
Modernes,’ that a Hitlerian provocateur would not act any different in order
to trouble honest minds.”
Rassinier to Paraz, October 4, 1951
“[…] I had sent a clarification to Les Temps Modernes about the Miklos
Nyiszli affair. I received a letter from the latter which lowers the six million
gassing victims of Paris-Presse and the 40 million of Les Temps Modernes ac-
cording to Kremer to ... 2,500,000 as having indiscriminately perished of gas,
hunger, cold and ill-treatment. As you can see, there is progress. Since Les
Temps Modernes asked me for my opinion on this response from their (Hun-
garian) coworker, I have proposed to them a general clarification that takes
into account:
– the first article published by them and echoed in an amplified manner by the
entire press;
– the new data from Miklos’s letter.
It’s been 15 days: no answer. I suppose they are embarrassed because:
1. Miklos proves me right along the entire line, except for the gas problem, to
which he clings tenaciously.
2. Because he assures that his figures:
a) have been inflated in the translation;
b) that he has seen the chambers and may have been mistaken about what he
says about them;
c) he does not state categorically that he has seen [them] in action ([he] limits
himself to generalities). There you have it!”
Rassinier to Paraz, August 13, 1952
“[…] No, I do not know Mr. Aroneau’s book. I knew that of Dr. Nyiszli Miklos
brought to the public’s attention by Sartre. Then I sent a response to Les
Temps Modernes. Not published, of course, but the Nyiszli in question has sent
me a personal letter in which he quibbles enough to fail to conceal the rup-

ture.[199] He pays me tribute, by the way (sic!).”
Rassinier to Paraz, April 17, 1953
“[…] Regarding the 6 million deaths of Auschwitz, this figure was launched
by Paris-Presse when the book by Nyiszli Miklos appeared, about which we
have correspondended. Paris-Presse had translated 9 million. For this camp,
Nuremberg set the total figure at 3 million (approximate to the 100,000). I be-
lieve the exact figure given is 2,950,000 (I should look it up in my documents).
Now, I wrote to Les Temps Modernes, who had published an excerpt from Mi-
klos’s book. Merleau-Ponty replied that ‘I was perhaps right, but objectively,
when discussing the figures, I minimize the damage of fascism and prove our
common adversaries to be right.’ Miklos himself wrote to me: ‘At the Nurem-
berg Trial, Haupsturmführer Hoess declared (confession registered S. 7821)
‘that during this period, 2,500,000 people were annihilated in the gas cham-
bers (of Auschwitz-Birkenau) and that another 500,000 died from hunger, of
ill-treatment’ and exhausting work. So, the figures I gave are completely justi-
fied’ (Reply transcribed word by word).
From which we must conclude that, when the author of a book says 2,500,000,
Paris-Presse translates it as 9 million, and Merle as 6 million... Already this
number shuffling undermines their sincerity, you see!
In fact, if I believe that about 3 million deportees died in Auschwitz, I do not
believe that 2,500,000 died in gas chambers. It would take pages to prove it
mathematically. The same must happen forAuschwitz as is happening for
Struthof, where 87 people were asphyxiated[200] while thousands and thou-
sands (tens of thousands) died at the camp.
That’s all I can tell you about this affair: 9 million who become 6 and then 2
and a half. When looking into it well, we would still get to tell Miklos, the orig-
inator of the hoax, that his figure is exaggerated. I did it in a second letter: he
did not answer me!!!
You can use this information and especially the text of Miklos’s letter, which is
very characteristic.”
2.3.2. The Correspondence among Paul Rassinier, Les Temps

Modernes and Miklós Nyiszli
On April 30, 1951, Tibor (Tibère) Kremer, who had translated from the Hun-
garian the excerpts of Nyiszli’s book published by Les Temps Modernes, re-
plied to a letter from Rassinier dated April 2, which apparently has not been
preserved, in which Kremer informed Rassinier that he would transmit its con-
tents to Nyiszli.
199
“la coupure”; this reference is unclear.
200
See in this regard Mattogno 2016e, Chapter 14, “The Gas Chamber at the Natzweiler Camp”
(Struthof), pp. 205-223.
On September 14, Kremer wrote to Rassinier:

“Sir,
by letter dated 2 April, which came to me through the magazine Les Temps
Modernes, you conveyed to me certain observations and remarks concerning
the book by Dr. Nyiszli.
On 30 April, I confirmed to you the receipt of this letter, informing you that I
[would] forward a copy to the author.
For various reasons, I can only now send you the answer of the latter. I be-
lieve, however, that despite the delay, this answer is still relevant and does not
ignore any of the points you have raised.
As a matter of form, please be so kind as to let me know the reception of this
reply from the author, of which I enclose a copy here.
I do not know whether you yourself have kept a copy of your letter to remind
you of these terms. If you do not have it, I could send you one, because I had it
copied in many copies [sic].
While waiting to read from you, I beg you, Sir, to accept my best regards.”
Evidently Rassinier had not kept a copy of the letter of April 2, since Kremer
sent him a copy attached to the letter of October 24, 1951.
In the Rassinier Archive, Nyiszli’s letter in question appears without date
in French translation, undoubtedly performed by Kremer. I append the origi-
nal French text with the permission of the sons of Rassinier (see Document 7),
and report here the English translation:
“People of different orientation read the touching facts related in my book
with divers feelings. One with sympathy, another with indifference, and a third
with animosity. There are also [some] who read, like Mr. Rassinier, with a be-
nevolent cavil. But there are many who pass over the essentials and consider
unimportant details through a magnifying glass or rather an ultra-microscope,
and so, without even intending to, flatten and minimize the series of crimes
unique in their kind that are related in it. In what follows, I respond briefly to
the questions raised by Mr. Rassinier.
1. I thank him for acknowledging that my work is the first to give a precise de-
scription of the operations of the annihilation factories of Auschwitz and
Birkenau, as well as the technique of death effected by gas. This was also rec-
ognized not only by the International Tribunal of Nuremberg, but also by 17
organized public debates in the presence of several thousand deportees.[201]
2. With regard to the figures I have given, I have the honor to inform you that
they are exact. This was recognized by one of the main defendants of the Nu-
remberg trial, the Hauptsturmfuehrer Hoess, who was the commandant of the
camp from May 1, 1940 to December 31, 1943, and who, according to his con-
fessions recorded ‘transcript S 7821,’ declared that during this period
2,500,000 people were annihilated in gas chambers, and another 500,000 died
due to hunger, ill-treatment and exhausting labor. It is therefore wrong to say
201
There is no record of these alleged 17 public debates.
that the gas chambers resumed [sic] their operation in 1942, and that the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp had already been evacuated in March 1944.
Finally, we other Hungarian deportees arrived there in May 1944, and by the
end of July already 550,000 Hungarian Jews had perished in the gas cham-
bers. It was exactly in 1944 that the annihilation took the most important pro-
portions, because after Stalingrad the Russians pushed back the German ar-
mies on a front of thousands of kilometers, and the still unconsidered prospect
of a defeat hastened the collection [evacuation] of all the still existing ghettos
and hastened the operation of the crematoria. I have written enough in this re-
gard and in a sufficiently explicit manner.
3. Hence, the figures I have given are completely justified, and those of the
critic are completely erroneous. We evacuated Auschwitz-Birkenau on Janu-
ary 18, 1945, and the few deportees who survived called this evacuation: the
death march; it ended in Mauthausen, as I also indicate in my journal.
4. The number of Crematoria. Whether there were 4 or 5 is a useless quib-
bling. However, to affirm this, I inform you that there were 4 in Birkenau and
one in Auschwitz, 3 kilometers away. Soon I will send you the original and au-
thentic plan of the Birkenau Camp, on which appears every barracks and also
every crematorium. You will be able to determine the exactness of the figure of
the 4 crematoria.
5. Duration of the cremation. It is totally useless to refer to the specialists of
Père Lachaise,[202] because the experts of this crematorium are only small
craftsmen compared to those who operated the furnaces coming from the firm
Topf & Soehne, a company specialized in the construction and installation of
crematoria. Moreover, I think I can claim the title of the most qualified expert
in this matter. I had the opportunity to directly and closely follow the opera-
tion of the crematoria for 8 months. At a moment of sentimental grip, I even
asked the following question to Oberscharfueher Mussfeld: When they will
have enough of me, and by order of Dr. Mengele he will have to liquidate me
with a shot into the nape of the neck, pray he does not do it in the dark corri-
dor of the hall, but at the first furnace. So on that day, my shift mate will not
have to drag me with a belt tied to my wrists across the concrete floor, thus
ripping the skin off my face and turning me into a disfigured corpse. Instead,
they can, according to the expression in use, ‘einschieben’ [push in203] me in
the furnace right where I died.
6. So the duration of the cremation is one thing at the Père Lachaise, and an-
other at Birkenau. This can last an hour in the first case, while it lasted no
more than twenty minutes in the second. The explanations are as follows: The
bodies of Père Lachaise were generally adequately nourished before their
death, and their incineration is accompanied by a solemn ceremony. Moreo-
ver, the duration of incineration is directly proportional to the intensity of the
heat, and inversely to the hygrometric degree [water content] of the object to
202
The largest cemetery in Paris, with a crematorium since 1888.
203
A handwritten note by Kremer says: “In German in the text = infornare [put in oven].”
be incinerated. The corpses of Birkenau, due to the presence in ghettos, con-

centration camps, and due to inhuman work, were only skin and bones, walk-
ing skeletons, so to speak. The furnaces were heated with coke, and next to
each a blower was installed that had the height of one story, driven by a pow-
erful electric motor. The incineration itself was not a ceremony, but an
‘Entloesung’ [recte: Endlösung], a conveyor-belt annihilation where every-
thing was used that modern technology can provide. The annihilation contin-
ued day and night. Very rarely did a crematorium stop for a short period of
time when repair or maintenance work was really indispensable.
7. The criticism only speaks of the periodic selections involving 300 people but
completely leaves aside the destruction of the transport. These transports con-
sisted of about 5 to 6 trains a day, each of 40 to 50 cars, brought in from every
corner of Europe, specifically to be destroyed here. Only by way of curiosity
do I mention that these trains were very often composed of old and antiquated
French cars. These trains carried an average 4,000 deportees each (90 people
in a car). Of these 4,000, at best 1,000 were sent to the right, the others direct-
ly to a crematorium. Besides, I have also spoken of two pyres that my critic
seems to have completely forgotten in his calculation.
8. As for the size of the undressing room and the gas chamber, I am willing to
admit that I have not measured them. Furthermore, I am neither an engineer
nor a technician who could simply establish the size of a place following an
estimate. As I said in the very preface of my book, I had not written with a re-
porter’s pen, but with that of a physician. It may also be that in 1946, when I
wrote the book, under the avalanche of horrors and under the weight of the
most intense impressions, my vision was not as clear as that of someone who
comes from the outside with a scrutinizing eye. It could therefore be that the
halls were only 100 or 120 meters long. This does not change anything about
the facts, and cannot possibly challenge the authenticity of the data. I cannot
even get myself to accurately give the size of my own room. Finally, I thank
Mr. Rassinier for occupying himself with the data I have provided, and for
having found them unique in their essential points. I agree with my critic when
he says that many publications contain false data and thus contribute to raise
doubts about the authenticity of events. However, I know for sure that anyone
can check my writings both in their medical and technical aspects. There can
be found only an image of incorruptible fidelity to the events without any ex-
aggeration and without any passion, as I have stated it, by the way, in my
statement signed with my own hand. I can be confident, however, that all I
have written is only a fragment, a glance thrown into the fleeting flash of
lightning. I could write a thousand times if I were not oversaturated by hor-
rors.”
Some comments impose themselves.
In 1951, Nyiszli repeated the lie of his book’s recognition as an important
historical document by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg,
which he consistently confused with the I.G. Farben Trial. In the six years
since the publication of his book, he still did not know the rank of Rudolf
Höss, whom he continued to qualify as Hauptsturmführer (captain), when in
fact the former Auschwitz commandant was known to have been an SS Ober-
sturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel), and he did not even wonder how a sim-
ple captain could have been the commandant of a huge camp such as Ausch-
witz. Nyiszli knew nothing about Höss’s return to Auschwitz in the spring and
summer of 1944 as SS Standortältester (commander of the garrison) in order
to coordinate the arrival and processing of the transports of Hungarian Jews.
Indeed, Nyiszli’s ignorance went so far as to present Höss as “one of the main
defendants of the Nuremberg trial,” while it is well known that the former
Auschwitz commandant was requested by Kurt Kauffmann, the defense attor-
ney of Ernst Kaltenbrunner – the former head of the RSHA after Reinhard
Heydrich’s assassination – as a defense witness. In that capacity, Höss ap-
peared during the hearing of April 15, 1946. In this context, Nyiszli’s insists
on referring to Höss’s affidavit of April 8, 1945 with the fanciful name “tran-
script S 7821,” that is, “Transkript Seite 7821” instead of its classification
number PS-3868.
I will address other revealing aspects of this letter in Part Three.
Part 3:
Critical Analysis
of Miklós Nyiszli’s Statements

3.1. From Hungary to Camp BIIf at Birkenau

Caveat
In order not to extend the text unnecessarily, I use below the following abbre-
viations for Nyiszli’s writings as quoted earlier:
D45: declaration of July 28, 1945
MBV: “Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban”
NI-11710: affidavit of October 8, 1947
TVN: “Tanú voltam Nürnbergben”
PR: letter to Paul Rassinier (1951)
3.1.1. The Journey

Nyiszli was deported from the ghetto of Aknaszlatina to Auschwitz. Ak-
naszlatina, which is currently named Solotvino, lies near the border between
Ukraine and Romania and was, at that time, on Hungarian territory.
The route followed by Nyiszli’s train to reach Auschwitz is nothing short
of amazing (MBV, Chapter I):
“The Tatra Mountains are behind us. We race at full speed toward Lublin,
then comes Krakau.”
The Tatra Mountains are divided into two mountain ranges. The northern
chain (High Tatras) is located on the border between Slovakia and Poland,
about 100 km south of Krakow. Aknaszlatina was part of the district of Már-
amarossziget. From this location, Jewish transports could get to Auschwitz via
any of the following three railway lines (Gilbert 1995, Map 255, p. 197):
1. Máramarossziget – Stryj – Lwów – Rzeszów – Tarnów – Auschwitz
2. Máramarossziget – Beregsas – Sanok – Przemyśl – Rzeszów – Tarnów –
Auschwitz
3. Máramarossziget – Beregsas – Prešov – Tarnów – Auschwitz
Lwów (Lemberg), Przemyśl, Rzeszów, Tarnów and Kraków were on Railway
Line 582, which ran close to the 50th parallel, from east to west (and vice ver-
sa).
Having crossed the Tatras, Nyiszli’s train crossed the third railway line, in
the north-west direction, but, having reached Tarnów, instead of turning west
to reach Krakow (about 75 km away), it went to the north-east to Lublin, in
order then to return back toward Tarnów (about 450 km)!
3.1.2. Nyiszli’s Arrival at Birkenau

Nyiszli is not particularly precise about the date of his arrival at Birkenau. He
mentions two different dates: May 20 (NI-11710) and May 22, 1944 (D45).
The first seems to refer to the departure of the transport, rather than to its arri-
val at Auschwitz:
“On May 22, 1944, along with 26 of my colleagues (all medical doctors taken
by force), I was sent from the Aknaszlatina ghetto to Auschwitz.”
The second date, however, refers without doubt to his arrival at Auschwitz:
“On May 19[-20] 1944, I went with a large transport from Hungary to the
Auschwitz Concentration Camp. There I was deloused, my belongings were
taken away, and I received a new inmate suit. On May 20[-21] 1944, I went to
Monowitz, the concentration camp of the IG-Farben factory Auschwitz.”
According to a transport list published by Randolph L. Braham, the only
transport from Aknaszlatina to Auschwitz left on May 25, 1944 and contained
3,317 deportees (Braham 1981b, Vol. II, p. 514).
According to the “List of Transports of Jews,” Nyiszli’s registration num-
ber was assigned on May 29th,204 which is roughly compatible with the
transport arriving there on May 25. On average, transports from Hungary to
Auschwitz lasted 3 days. It is possible that Nyiszli’s train arrived at Auschwitz
on the 28th, after which he was disinfested and registered in Camp Sector
BIIf, where he arrived either during the night of the May 28 or during the
morning of May 29. This means that both dates given by Nyiszli are inaccu-
rate.
Nyiszli claims to have been transferred to Monowitz the day after his arri-
val, hence either on May 21 or 23, where he claims to have remained for 12
(D45) or 14 days.
In his book, Nyiszli makes no mention of his transfer to this camp. As not-
ed earlier (see Section 2.2.1.), the editor of the 1964 edition noticed this fact
and tried to explain it with a statement by Nyiszli’s widow that, “by omitting
the part about Monowitz, [Nyiszli] aimed at maintaining the uniformity of the
book’s structure, since he did not want to break the main argument;” the editor
opined that this procedure “does not affect the book’s credibility at all.” That
is clearly arguable, because it introduces right from the start an irremediable
contradiction.
3.1.3. The Monowitz Camp (Buna)

Nyiszli spent 12 or 14 days in Monowitz. As noted earlier, contrary to his
statements, he left Hungary on May 25 and was registered at Auschwitz on the
204
Liste der Judentransporte, APMO, microfilm 727/30, p. 16: on May 29, the numbers 7741-9740
were assigned to Hungarian Jews.
29th; if he spent only one day in this camp, he was transferred to Monowitz on
May 31. The circumstances he wrote down above all in D45 are reflected, if
only as a presumable effect, in the only known Auschwitz document that men-
tions his name. It is a “transfer notification to B II f” (Verlegungsmeldung
nach B II f) of the Häftlingskrankenbau (inmate infirmary) of Monowitz dated
June 27, 1944, which lists three transferred detainees “as physicians on behalf
of the first camp physician Concentration Camp Auschwitz III” (“als Ärzte im
Auftrages 1. Lagerarztes KL Au. III”). The inmates in question, all three Jews,
are:205
1. Marcus Wind, registration number 167695
2. Jecheskiel Körner, registration number 169840
3. Nikolaus Niszly (sic), registration number A 8450
The document is signed by an SS Unterscharführer of the health service
(S.D.G., Sanitätsdienstgrad), whose name is illegible. Because of its structure
and its content, it had to be part, at least originally, of the series of lists con-
cerning the transfer of detainees from Monowitz to Auschwitz and Birkenau
which were collected in the series of documents filed at Nuremberg as NI-
14997, in which, however, it is not to be found. In this documentation, trans-
fers to Sector BIIf of the Birkenau Camp are also attested. The first extant
transfer document of this kind has the date of May 5, 1944, and concerns in-
mate no. 173050, Wasil Belowus. The header reads “H-Krankenbau Arbeits-
lager Monowitz,” the subject is “Verlegungsmeldung. Nach dem HKB B II f”
(Transfer notification. To Inmate Hospital B II f”). The illegible signature is
by an SS Unterscharführer (NI-14997, p. 568).
Polish historian Antoni Makowski wrote that, from March 5 to May 18,
1944, 82 doctors, dentists, pharmacists and x-ray operators were transferred in
12 groups from the Monowitz inmate hospital to Sector BIIf of the Birkenau
Camp, in addition to two other groups who were transferred on January 14
and June 27, 1944. He refers for this to an “Überstellungsliste” (transfer list)
stored in the archives of the Auschwitz Museum with the ID number (sygna-
tura) “D-AuIII-5/3”; he gives four page numbers for these documents, page
580 among them (Makowski 1974, p. 117.). This is precisely the page number
that appears in the Nyiszli transfer sheet dated June 27, 1944, which means
that the source must be the aforementioned transfer list. It is unknown to me
whether it contains other documents related to Nyiszli.
It is a fact, however, that the aforementioned transfer sheet establishes that
Nyiszli, together with Dr. Körner, was a member of the medical staff of the
Monowitz inmate hospital. It follows from this that his story is necessarily
false, both regarding the date (if we follow his timeline, he would have been
transferred on June 14 at the latest: 14 days after May 31), and regarding the
circumstances of the transfer, that is to say, the Auschwitz camp’s chief phy-
205
Document published by F. Herber in: Nyiszli 1992, p. 180; later also by Kubica 1997, p. 385.
sician’s drafting of about 50 doctors who were present in Monowitz 12 or 14

days after May 31. Nyiszli also claimed to have been assigned to the cement-
bag-carrying Kommando 197, and did not name the inmate infirmary (Häft-
lingskrankenbau) at all.
In Document NI-11710, Nyiszli states that he was transferred to Monowitz
with 6,000 inmates (in TVN with 7,000). As newcomers, they were told that
they were there in order to “croak in the concrete.” This is not reflected in any
document and indubitably must therefore be false, because the maximum
force reached by this camp – in mid-1944 – was about 11,000 prisoners
(Wagner 2000, p. 146), and it is not credible that 6,000 were transferred from
Birkenau to Monowitz on one day, i.e., on May 30, 1944.
He states and repeats that there were 200 Kommandos in Monowitz, and
that he was employed in Kommando number 197. This isn’t true either, be-
cause the 11,000 Monowitz detainees mentioned above were divided into 110
“Häftlingskommandos” (ibid.).
Makowski reports the average occupancy of the Monowitz Camp month by
month from November 1942 (2,300 inmates) until December 1944 (10,500
inmates). In June and July, the occupancy was 10,100 inmates, reaching a
peak in August with 11,500 inmates (Makowski, p. 134).
In TVN, Nyiszli lets his fantasy run wild by asserting that 40,000 inmates
worked at the huge I.G. Farben construction site, and that 100,000 inmates
had died in Monowitz from 1942 to June 1944. As for the first point, the
camp’s maximum occupancy, as just mentioned, was about 11,500 inmates. In
D45, Nyiszli contradicts himself by claiming that, on his arrival at the Mono-
witz camp, there were not 40,000, but “only” some 14,000 inmates.
And what about the 100,000 dead? Makowski summarizes in a table the
prisoners who perished in Monowitz from November 1942 to December 1944,
divided into two categories: the camp itself and the inmate hospital. Overall,
264 inmates died at the camp (presumably due to accidents at work), while
1,361 passed away in the hospital (ibid., p. 137). In the month of June, during
which Nyiszli was in Monowitz until the 27th, there were only 5 deaths at the
camp and 26 at the hospital. His tale of exhausted prisoners who died in the
camp or during work having been buried in cable ditches is both false and
senseless; false because the prisoners who died in Monowitz were regularly
registered in the Auschwitz mortuary registry (Leichenhallenbuch). The extant
documentation goes from October 7, 1941 through August 31 1943, and con-
tains the deceased inmates on a daily basis, giving their registration number
and their origin. During August 1943, for instance, 15 prisoners died in
Monowitz according to Makowski’s aforementioned table: 3 in the camp and
12 in the hospital. For the same month, the mortuary registry lists 17 inmates
who died at Monowitz (listed as “Buna”), two on the 9th (nos. 114990 and
117850) and on the 12th (nos. 127047 and 125042), one on the 14th (no.
128072), two on the 16th (nos. 1177786 and 4368-E) and 18th (nos. 126629
and 106760), three on the 21st (nos. 5140-E, 5694-E and 5655-E), one on the
25th (no. 116625), 28th (no. 129108) and 30th (no. 116820), and again two on
the 31st (nos. 125465 and 117567).206 Nyiszli’s statement is nonsensical, be-
cause a registered prisoner could not disappear from the camp without leaving
documents behind (of his death or transfer).
In NI-11710, no doubt in response to a specific question, Nyiszli also
wrote about the “gassing” of Monowitz inmates in Birkenau:
“6) When I was active in the Birkenau crematorium, I convinced myself in
three cases that transports numbering some 2-300 detainees from Monowitz
went to be gassed, hence inmates who had worked for IG-Farben. Even the SS
men talked openly about it.
7) The inmate transports from Monowitz sent to Birkenau for extermination
were not marked in any special way, because all transports destined for ex-
termination left their camp with utterly ragged clothes and shoes.”
According to Danuta Czech’s Kalendarium, however, the only “selection” that
took place at the Monowitz Camp leading to the selectees being “gassed” at
Birkenau is said to have occurred on October 17, 1944 and involved 2,000
inmates.207 In his book, Nyiszli writes about the alleged events of October
1944 in Chapters XXX (“yesterday, October 6, 1944”) and XXXII (“It is No-
vember 1, 1944”), but here he never even hints at this alleged gassing event.
In TVN, Nyiszli talks about the punishment with 25 blows, among other
things, “also for this cement paper bag that we put on our shoulders,” but this
was not punishable at all, indeed it was even recommended by the leaders of
the SS. On October 26, 1943, Oswald Pohl, the head of the WVHA, issued a
directive on improving the living conditions of concentration camp inmates.
Regarding the clothing, he ordered (Mattogno 2016c, pp. 17, 299):
“Newspaper is an effective protection against the cold (because it keeps in the
heat). Therefore, if necessary, have several layers of newspaper worn on the
chest, belly and kidney area. You must give attention to procuring a sufficient
amount of paper.
If need be, inmates may make their own paper waistcoats. Shredded paper in
socks is also a good protection against the cold. If no hat is available, allow
close-fitting paper caps to be made as well. In this case, hair may be kept long
as well to retain heat.”
In this context Nyiszli added in TVN:
“An SS doctor was present at the punishment, but he often had to establish
that death had occurred. Death was caused by the contusion either of the kid-
neys or of the lumbar vertebrae. The fact is that the number of blows was ab-
solutely not in compliance with the article of the concentration camp regula-
206
AGK, OB-385, pp. 220-228.
207
Czech 1989, p. 908. The data is taken from a list of “gassings” compiled by Leib Langfus, whose
mendacious nature I have exposed in Mattogno 2016c, Subsection 5.4.4.7., pp. 135f.
tions about corporal punishment, because one can count them up to 40; the
number of lashes was never less when I was an eyewitness of the event.”
Punishments with “a single-tail leather whip” or Zuchtrute (stick) were gov-
erned by the concentration camp regulation and documented on a special offi-
cial form. An inmate could receive between 5 and 25 lashes only on the unex-
posed (clothed) buttocks or thighs, and the inmate to be punished could not be
tied down. The camp physician (Lagerarzt) had to first draw up a medical re-
port on the prisoner’s condition and send it to the WVHA, where a superior
then decided whether or not to authorize the administration of the whip or
stick. The form was signed by the detainee who carried out the punishment,
and by the witnessing SS men, who were the camp commander, the head of
the protective custody camp, and the camp physician. Precisely because this
kind of punishment was so heavily regulated, and therefore eliminated from
individual arbitrariness, it is inconceivable that up to 40 lashes or blows were
ever administered, unless as a violation of the camp regulations by the camp
commander himself!208
Precisely at the I.G. Farben Trial, the defendant Walter Dürrfeld presented
in his defense an affidavit by a former Jewish Auschwitz inmate, Gerszon
Waksmann. He had been interned at Birkenau in August 1943 (registration
number 150150), and in March 1944 he was transferred to the Monowitz
Camp. Since he provided an image of this camp that is antithetical to that
drawn by Nyiszli, a juxtaposition is pertinent. I translate here the essential
passages of his testimony:209
“The inmates of this camp were employed at I.G. Farbenindustrie Inc.,
Auschwitz. I was doing better there than at the Birkenau Camp. Order and
cleanliness at the Buna camp were a fundamental principle. For us detainees
it was of advantage to come into contact with free civilians, because we had
better treatment due to this and we were not exposed to prison psychosis as in
other camps. The camp itself was the best concentration camp I have ever
known. Each inmate had his own bed. That 2 or 3 prisoners together always
had to share one bed is absolutely erroneous. Each inmate had two blankets;
later there were even padded blankets. The stuffing of the straw bags could
always be replaced when necessary. We had to keep our beds always in im-
peccable condition, and as a side job I was a ‘bed-builder.’ We had to wash
ourselves every day and take a bath every week. Cleanliness was valued so
much that comrades who had rashes, such as beard lichen, were not allowed
to go to work. [...]
At normal performance, we received so-called premium vouchers of an aver-
age value of 1.-- to 2.-- RM, which were very welcome by us, because in the
208
Mattogno 2016c, pp. 28-20 and Documents 8f., pp. 307-310.
209
Duerrfeld Documents, Doc. No. 1075, Exh. 210, Eidesstattliche Erklärung by Gerszon Waks-
mann, January 16, 1948. National Archives Microfilm Publications, Microfilm Publication M892,
Roll 66.
camp canteen we received cigarettes, drinks, potato salad, herrings, etc. for
them.[210]
The working time was 9 hours, with a lunch break of 1 hour. In winter the
working time was much shorter, because at sunset we had to be at the camp. It
was similar in case of fog or foggy weather.
At the construction site, I saw young prisoners between 14 and 16 years old.
They were apprentices and were trained as masons, carpenters, electricians,
etc. In addition, the youngest of them, the so-called ‘Piepels,’ were with the
Kapos and had to organize for them [meaning that they served as their valets].
I have never seen an employee of the IG or another company mistreating an
inmate. On the contrary, I was with these people on terms more or less like
workmates. In our factory, they did not beat us otherwise either. Once, howev-
er, I was beaten by a prisoner foreman – because I had been caught smoking
at the construction site. The Kapos as well as the inmate foremen punished
inmates in this way when they had done some mischief or shirked from work.
But it was not the fault of the IG, which was a staunch opponent of mistreat-
ments and therefore had forbidden it to its people. […211]
The IG’s foremen never denied help to comrades who got injured or had an
accident. In the case of minor things, such as abrasions or the like, they were
bandaged and not used in jobs that could have aggravated their wounds. In
the event of an accident, the detainee in question was taken to the plant’s
health center and treated there. If it was serious, the Kapo communicated the
incident to the SS labor-deployment leader, which provided transportation to
the camp – if necessary on a stretcher or with a vehicle. At the infirmary he
was given medical care and given the necessary medicines. If one of us got
sick, he communicated it to the block eldest, who then had to see to it that the
patient got to the infirmary. As far as I know, this did not cause difficulties,
and the patient could recover there with adequate treatment. At Buna, they
were generally very generous with granting sick leaves and convalescence
time. In my workshop, a weak inmate once returned from the infirmary; during
work he could still take it easy until he had regained his strength. The foremen
generously disregarded this, asking only that appearances be saved. [...]
210
Productivity bonuses (Leistungsprämien) were a standard practice at Auschwitz. On the basis of
extant documents from July 16, 1943 to November 30, 1944, 214,119 Reichsmarks were awarded
in bonuses. See Mattogno 2016c, pp. 30ff.
211
Mistreating detainees was forbidden even to SS men. In case a prisoner violated any regulation,
SS guards were required to file a disciplinary report (Meldung) that was forwarded to the camp
headquarters, which decided on the punishment to be imposed, if any. See Mattogno 2016c, pp.
22-28; Document 7 (p. 306) is a Meldung of the Jewish inmate of the Monowitz Camp Davied
Jsef of January 22, 1944, who had left his workplace without permission. The prohibition of mis-
treatment also applied to so-called prominent inmates; if they mistreated a prisoner, they, too,
were punished. See ibid., Documents 5 and 6 on p. 305. Document 5 is a request by the SS garri-
son physician Wirths to investigate and, if applicable, punish the culprit of the “mistreatment of
inmate 115385 Richard Jedrzekiewicz,” who had been beaten by a block eldest at the Monowitz
Camp (July 7, 1943).
The inmates’ food, breakfast and a thick evening stew, was administered by
the SS. At breakfast there was coffee, 300 grams of bread with margarine,
lunch meat or jam as toppings. Once a week, as a supplement, there was ‘Bu-
na bread’ (600 grams) and a double piece of margarine. For lunch, the IG al-
so provided a soup, made mostly of potatoes and vegetables. On Sundays this
soup was even better. The food corresponded roughly to that of the current av-
erage German consumer. When an [inmate] also received second servings –
and this often happened – then he had even more [food] than this. Thanks to
this extra food we were also able to cope with labor demands.[212] What was
most depressing was not even the work, but only the many roll calls of the SS
in the camp.
In winter, the IG helped us with a lot of extra clothing. Those working out-
doors in general had in addition to their coat and gloves also a padded sleeve-
less ‘Auschwitz waistcoat.’ I wore wooden clogs, stockings and foot rags, be-
cause the wooden clogs were the warmest. Coke stoves were burning scattered
throughout the factory, at which we could warm ourselves. This was very
pleasant during the winter cold.
Unlike the Main Camp, there was no crematorium at Monowitz, and neither
were there any gassings. We were therefore all glad to be at the Buna Camp,
because we were treated there much better by the IG. I do not know whether
the plant management knew of the gassings at Birkenau; if so, they could not
have done anything about it either without being themselves locked up in a
concentration camp.”
As for the alleged gassings, the witness evidently picked up the rumors that
circulated in the camp and were bandied about in the post-war court rooms.
Similar to this testimony is the deposition made by Jakob Lewinski in 1958
during the investigations leading up to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of the
1960s.213 According to his testimony, Lewinski, who was classified as a half-
Jew by the Nuremberg Law because he was the son of a Jewish father, was
sent to Auschwitz because he had refused to divorce his wife, who was classi-
fied as a full-Jew. His wife was apparently deported at the same time he was,
but not with him, and he never heard from her again. She was later declared
legally dead, but no one has ever found out what her fate had been.
Lewinski claims that he heard only after the war that the sorting on arrival
at Auschwitz supposedly meant the difference between life and death in the
gas chamber. While in Auschwitz, he was evidently unaware of it.
212
Food supplements were also standard practice. For example, the request for “Additional food for
the concrete squad of the Central Construction Office’s unit” (Zusatz-Verpflegung für das Baulei-
tungs-Kommando Beton-Kolonne) was written by the head of the Central Construction Office on
November 10, 1943, because the aforementioned prisoner squad had to perform “urgent and hard
work” (dringende und schwere Arbeiten). RGVA, 502-1-256, p. 129.
213
Staatsanwaltschaft beim LG Frankfurt (Main), Strafsache beim Schwurgericht Frankfurt (Main)
gegen Baer und Andere wegen Mordes, ref. 4 Js 444/59, Vol. 2, pp. 305-310 cf. Rudolf 2003, pp.
356f. Subsequent page numbers from there.
Having been interned at the Monowitz Camp, he described his living con-
ditions there as “humane” (p. 305):
“Inside the camp there was a bordello with 10 women, but they were only
available to Reich German prisoners. The prisoners received up to 150 DM
[should be RM-Reichsmarks] in scrips per week for their labor, with which
they could purchase mustard, sauerkraut, red beets and so on […]
The camp had generally good sanitary facilities, bathing and showering rooms
and an excellent health-care facility. [...] For provisions we received 1/3 [loaf
of] commissary bread three times a week, 1/2 commissary bread 4 times, and
additionally a bowl of coffee in the morning, 20 grams of margarine 5 times,
one time a small amount of jam and one time a piece of cheese. In the after-
noon at work there was the so-called Buna soup, nutritionally worthless. In the
evening there was a thicker soup, partly beets, partly cabbage etc.” (p. 305R)
Lewinski stated that because of the 12-hour workday with insufficient nour-
ishment there was initially a high death rate, but conditions improved and the
death rate was substantially reduced.
“Our camp commander was SS Obersturmführer Schöttl, who was sentenced
to death at Dachau, supposedly for crimes he had committed before he came
to our camp, because as camp commander of our camp he would never have
deserved the death penalty.” (p. 306)
3.1.4. The Hospital Camp BIIf at Birkenau

I mentioned earlier that Nyiszli’s transfer to Monowitz and his presence there
create an irremediable contradiction. In fact, in Chapter I of his book, Nyiszli
claims that Dr. Mengele ordered the physicians on his transport to step for-
ward already during the initial “selection” upon arrival at Auschwitz:
“Dr. Mengele orders the doctors to form a group to one side. When this is
done, he approaches the group, about fifty doctors in all, and calls on any doc-
tors who did their studies at a German university, are thoroughly versed in
pathological anatomy, and who also practice forensic medicine to step for-
ward.”
Nyiszli responded to the invitation. Mengele was satisfied with his answers,
and during the night he drove him to Camp Sector BIIf, where he was disin-
fested, tattooed with the number A-8450, and given civilian clothes. That
would have happened on the same day as his arrival, hence May 20 or 22 ac-
cording to Nyiszli, but, as I explained earlier, this number was actually as-
signed on May 29.
Strangely, this story, without any mention of the transfer to Monowitz, also
appears in the “Declaration” that Nyiszli claims to have sent “to the Interna-
tional Tribunal at Nuremberg,” where, he claims, he was essentially interro-
gated precisely about this labor camp (see here starting on page 141). In fact,
of the ten questions that Minskoff allegedly put to him in writing, eight con-
cerned the I.G. Farbenindustrie (see here on page 144).
In D45, Nyiszli wrote that after 12 days in Monowitz, the chief medical of-
ficer of the camp, who was an SS Hauptsturmführer, summoned all the inmate
physicians, who were a group of fifty, just as in his book. He volunteered with
his colleague “who worked in a Medical School in Strasbourg.” From the
transfer order of June 27, 1944 mentioned earlier, we know that Nyiszli went
to Sector BIIf with two other doctors, Jecheskiel Körner (No. 169840), and
Marcus Wind, (No. 167695), but in TVN he speaks only of the first in these
terms:
“Dr. Körner, József, physician, Nizza (Auschwitz, Crematorium II, dissection
room).”
This must therefore have been Nyiszli’s colleague, but the only doctor from
Strasbourg he mentioned was Robert Lévy (TVN; see Section 4.1.2.):
“Dr. Lewy, Robert, university professor, Strasbourg, (Camp Sector F)”
In Monowitz, the two inmate physicians underwent a thorough examination,
evidently by the local medical officer, and were accepted. According to his
book, only Nyiszli was subjected to an examination, but right at his arrival in
Birkenau and by Dr. Mengele himself. According to D45, Nyiszli and Dr.
Körner were loaded onto a Red Cross ambulance and taken directly to Crema-
torium II. In his book, however, Nyiszli says that, before going to the cremato-
rium, he spent at least five days at Camp Sector BIIf, as can be seen from the
chronology of his story: on his first day, he received two corpses to dissect; on
the next day, he received three more, and remained inactive for the next three
days. On the fifth day, he was picked up by Dr. Mengele and transferred to the
crematorium (MBV, Chapters Vf.).
In D45, Nyiszli and his colleague were given a clean room as their lodging,
after which Dr. Mengele subjected them to another one-hour examination. In
his book, this exam disappears, just like the colleague: Nyiszli was completely
alone in his room. Dr. Körner appears only in Chapter XVIII, when Dr. Meng-
ele sent three assistants to Nyiszli into his room:
“The first whose hand I shake is Dr. Görög Dénes, a private university lectur-
er and pathologist at the State Public Hospital of Szombathely. He is a short,
thin man of about forty-five years of age who wears thick glasses. He makes a
good impression on me. I have the feeling that we will be good friends. The
second is a short, stocky individual of about fifty years of age, with a hunched
back and a very ugly face. He is Fischer Adolf, autopsy assistant for twenty
years at the Prague Institute of Anatomy. As a Czech Jew, he has been an in-
mate of the K.Z. for five years already. The third is Dr. Körner Józef, a physi-
cian from Nice, inmate of the K.Z. for four years already. A taciturn but quali-
fied young man, he is only thirty-two years old.”
Nyiszli met Dr. Körner on this occasion for the first time. But when did the
meeting take place? In Nyiszli’s intricate narrative, there are two statements
allowing us to pinpoint it: both before and after that first meeting, he mentions
that he had been in Birkenau for three months:
“It is already three months since we parted from each other on the ramp!”
(Chapter XVI)
“I am an expert and I have been working here for three months now!” (Chap-
ter XIX)
Hence, the meeting took place at the end of August or in early September
1944. This would mean that Dr. Körner was transferred from Monowitz to
Crematorium II of Birkenau together with Nyiszli at the end of June 1944, but
that Nyiszli met him for the first time in this crematorium only two months
later!
In Chapter II of his book, Nyiszli describes the registration procedure in
Camp Sector BIIf:
“I proceed to the third barracks, alone with my escort. There the sign reads
‘Bath and Disinfection’.”
Here he was washed, shaved, disinfested and tattooed. In Chapter III he speci-
fies:
“From the bath building, accompanied by a new escort who carries my card
in his hand, I pass into the barracks which stands opposite and which bears
the number 12 on its front. It’s a building around 100 meters long. The interi-
or forms a large hall. Along both sides of the hall run lines of three-tier bunks
made of rough-sawn beams and planks, divided into compartments crowded
with patients. I am in Camp ‘F,’ Hospital Barracks 12.”
The most detailed study of Birkenau’s hospital camp in Sector BIIf is proba-
bly D. Czech’s 1974 long article “The Role of the Hospital Camp for Males at
Concentration Camp Auschwitz II.” She gives a detailed description of the
barracks (or blocks) making up this sector, and also reproduces a blueprint.
From this blueprint we discern that Barracks 3 was not in front of Barracks 12,
but was located between Barracks 1 (to the north) and 5 (to the south); in front
of it, there was Barracks 2 (to the east); on the other side, at a greater distance,
was Barracks 14 (see Document 8).
The length of the barracks – about 100 meters – is another mistake. From
aerial photographs of 1944 we can glean that Barracks 12 of Camp Sector BIIf
was slightly longer and wider than a horse-stable barracks (Pferdestallba-
racke), the most common type of barracks in Birkenau, which measured 40.76
m × 9.56 m. It was therefore probably a Luftwaffenbaracke (air-force bar-
racks) measuring 41.39 m ×12.64 m.
3.2. The Birkenau Crematoria

3.2.1 Terminology
By his own account, Nyiszli spent months in the Birkenau crematoria, and in
Chapter VI of the book, he even boasts that he spoke better German than cer-
tain SS guards he met:
“It impresses them that I speak their language more perfectly than they do.”
As such, one might expect him to demonstrate an accurate knowledge of the
relevant German terminology for the crematoria.
Nyiszli had indeed studied medicine in Germany, where he lived for ten
years during the 1920s. His various statements are replete with German terms,
starting with the names for SS ranks. The terms which recur most often un-
doubtedly are Sonderkommandó and Kommandó, written with the Hungarian
long-vowel accent over the final -ó. Apart from certain geographical names,
names of newspapers, institutions and the like, and apart from some rather
improbable dialogues which he recounts with evident satisfaction (but which
he would have had to have recorded or stenographed to report accurately), the
terms relative to concentration camp life which appear in the book are as fol-
lows: Arzt (doctor), Appel (recte Appell, roll-call), Appelplatz (Appellplatz,
roll-call square), zur Sektion (for autopsy), S.D.G. Sanitätsdienstgefreiter (pri-
vate in the medical service; the meaning was actually Sanitätsdienstgrad,
leaving the military rank (Dienstgrad) open), Kriminaldoktor (“criminal doc-
tor”214), Passierschein (pass, permit), Fkl (Frauenkonzentrationslager, wom-
en’s concentration camp), I. [erster] Lagerarzt (chief camp physician), Lager-
polizei (camp police), Zählappel (Zählappell, numbering roll call), “Antreten,
alle antreten” (“Fall in, everyone fall in”; order to line up for roll call), Ar-
beitslager (labor camp) and K.Z. (Konzentrationslager, concentration camp).
In TVN, he uses still other terms: Obergenickschütze (literally chief neck-
shooter), Stammlager (Main Camp, i.e., Auschwitz I), Schonung (convales-
cence), Schonungslager (convalescence camp), H.K.B., Häftlingskrankenbau
(inmate infirmary), Giftgas (poison gas), Menschenlager (recte Männerlager,
men’s camp), Strafkommando (penal unit), Zerleg[e]kommando (disassem-
bling unit).
When it comes to the crematoria, however, the only German term Nyiszli
used (in his letter to Paul Rassinier) is the verb einschieben (insert, push in),
which is also the primary definition given in any dictionary for the Italian verb
infornare (lit. “put into a furnace/oven”). This usage, apart from not being
214
See Note 53 on p. 46.
commonly attested to in other sources,215 was not the one usually used in for-
mal writings, for contemporary sources make clear that the normally preferred
term for loading corpses was einführen/Einführung (introduce/introduction).
Thus, for example, the device for introducing corpses into a cremation muf-
fle216 was called a Leicheneinführungs-Vorrichtung (corpse-introduction de-
vice) and later Einführtrage (introduction stretcher); the door to the muffle it-
self was called an Einführungstür (introduction door); even the metal slide
rollers installed in front of the door to the muffle were known as Einführ-
rolle.217
With the sole exception of krematórium, a word which moreover was
known to all prisoners in Birkenau, Nyizli never utilizes any of the numerous
German terms in common use for describing cremation or the cremation fur-
naces and their elements, such as: Einäscherung (incineration, cremation),
Verbrennung (burning, combustion), Ofen (furnace), Einäscherungsofen (cre-
mation furnace), Dreimuffel-Einäscherungsofen (triple-muffle cremation fur-
nace), Muffel (muffle, cremation chamber), Einführungstür (introduction
door), Schamotterost (chamotte grill, i.e., the refractory-brick grill which
formed the floor of the muffle), Aschenraum (“ash” [i.e., bone fragment] col-
lector beneath the refractory-brick grill), Generator (gasifier), Feuerung
(hearth), Rauchkanal (smoke channel, flue), Druckluftanlage (forced-air sys-
tem), Druckluftgebläse (forced-air blower), Trage or Einführtrage (corpse-
introduction stretcher), Beheizung (heating of the furnaces), Verbrennungs-
raum (cremation room), Ofenraum (furnace room), Schornstein (chimney),
Schamotte (chamotte, refractory clay), Koks (coke) and koksbeheizt (coke-
fired), Heizer (stoker) and Rauch (smoke).
Instead, Nyiszli exclusively uses Hungarian terms in this context, some of
them rather odd. Here are just the principal ones used:
– kemence: “furnace” (Ofen)
– égetőkemencek: “cremation furnaces” (Einäscherungsöfen)
– kazán: literally “boiler” but used by Nyiszli in the generic sense of “fur-
nace,” as is clear from the two terms which follow
– kazánterem: literally “boiler room” but here “furnace room” or “oven
room” (Ofenraum)
– égetőkazán: literally “cremation boiler” but here “cremation furnace”
– tűzszekrény: “fire cabinet” or “fire chamber” (from the context – the substi-
tution of the refractory linings, in Chapter XXXI – this may refer to either
215
Known exceptions are, for instance, Fritz Sander’s letter of Sept. 4, 1942 (Doc. 242 in Mattog-
no/Deana 2015, Part 2, p. 402): “[…] die Leichen müssen von vorn durch diese Tür in die Muffel
eingeschoben werden.” And the Leicheneinführungs-Vorrichtung itself contained a Verschiebe-
wagen (Doc 215, ibid., p. 367)!
216
The term muffle (or sometimes retort) is used to denote the individual furnace compartment in
which a corpse is cremated, in distinction to the cremation furnace as a whole.
217
Mattogno/Deana 2015, Part 1, pp. 234 (“Einführrollen”), 272.
the “cremation chamber” (muffle) itself, or to the coke hearth (Feu-

er[ungs]raum)
– hamvasztószekrények: “cremation cabinets” (from the context – the de-
scription of the Sonderkommando’s work loading corpses in the furnaces in
Chapter X – here clearly muffles)
– kémény: chimney (Schornstein, Kamin)
– samottbélés: refractory lining (Schamottefutter)
– tüzelók: stokers (Heizer); the “chief stoker,” however, curiously is the
generálfűtő
A document titled “Operating Instructions for the Topf Coke-fired Triple-
muffle Cremation Furnace” (Betriebsvorschrift des koksbeheizten Topf-Drei-
muffel-Einäscherungsofen) has survived the war, and has even been repro-
duced in some translated editions of Nyiszli’s book (for instance in Nyiszli
1992. p. 33, and in Nyiszli 1961a). It is reproduced as Document 9 in the Ap-
pendix at the end of this study.
On September 24, 1941, the Topf firm wrote to the Auschwitz Construc-
tion Office with regard to similar operating instructions for the Topf double-
muffle furnace, attached to the letter in three copies, and regarding the Topf
forced-draft device, that a copy of these instructions had to be posted in the
furnace hall protected by a glass pane to ensure that the equipment be used
correctly.218 Although this refers to the cremation devices installed at Crema-
torium I at the Auschwitz Main Camp, it is a reasonable inference that the
same requirement for posting the operating instructions in the furnace hall is
true for the triple-muffle furnaces installed in the Birkenau Crematoria II and
III in 1943. It is impossible to believe that Nyiszli, who claimed to have spent
at least seven months in Crematorium II, would not have read it. It contained a
great many terms relative to the triple-muffle furnace which a witness in that
situation could hardly have remained ignorant of. But then again, how could
he have read it, given that it was located in a furnace hall equipped with five
triple-muffle furnaces, when he maintained that he had “seen” fifteen single
furnaces there?
Nyiszli attributes to the crematoria a series of non-existent rooms and de-
vices (such as the dynamos, dynamók, mentioned in Chapters XXIX and
XXXI); on the other hand, he takes no notice of such important locations and
equipment as the corpse chute (Rutsche), the trash incinerator (Müllverbren-
nungsofen) and the fuel storage area (Brennstofflager).
Nyiszli never mentions a number of German terms which are in common
use in the testimonial literature on the “gassings,” such as Gaskammer (gas
chamber), Auskleideraum (undressing room), and Aufzug (elevator), for which
218
APMO, BW 11/1/3, p. 1. The two sets of instructions are largely the same, minor differences re-
lating to the change from a double- to a triple-muffle system notwithstanding. For the double-
muffle instructions see Mattogno/Deana 2015, Part 2, Document 210, p. 358 (the triple-muffle in-
structions as reproduced here are there on p. 382).
he always uses the Hungarian terms gázkamara, vetkezőterem or vetkezőhelyi-

ség,219 and teherfelvonógép (lit. “freight elevator”). For him, Zyklon B is al-
ways just Cyclon (once) or cyklon in his book, even though he claims to have
seen the label on a can.
He is ignorant of the term Bunker in reference to the farmhouse allegedly
transformed into a gassing facility (i.e., Bunker 2)220 – and the farmhouse that
he does describe is not used for gassings at all, but rather is an undressing
room for victims to be killed by shooting (MBV, Chapter XIII). He is also ig-
norant of the term Verbrennungsgruben for the cremation pits allegedly used
nearby, calling them instead máglyak (pyres).
For him a “complete barracks lockdown” is “teljes barakkzárlat”; he has
no notion of the term, known to every Auschwitz prisoner, of Blocksperre.
Finally, while he does know the term “Canada” (Kanada), which in the
camp’s jargon referred to the Effektenlager, a storage facility for prisoners’ ef-
fects consisting of thirty barracks, for him the term refers to a rubbish heap
burning in the courtyard of Crematorium II (III in today’s nomenclature; see
Section 3.7.1.)!
Considering that Nyiszli, writing for a Hungarian audience, nevertheless
felt the urge to use many unessential German terms in his text, it is surprising
that he never used several of the most common German terms that are much
more crucial to his story. For instance, he never used the term “Vernich-
tungslager” (extermination camp), allegedly of common use at Auschwitz at
that time. For him, the “extermination camp” was the equivalent Hungarian
term “megsemmisítő tabor” (annihilation camp). The same is true for the now
world-famous motto “Arbeit macht frei” spanning the entry gate of the
Auschwitz Main Camp, which for him was simply “A munka szabaddá tesz”
(“Work makes you free,” Chapter XIX).
Even his alleged workplace for at least seven months, the dissection room,
is never referred to by its German term (Sezierraum) but always with the
Hungarian term (boncterem); this also applies to the adjacent laboratory (La-
boratorium), for Nyiszli the “munkaterem.” Nyiszli, who spent ten years as a
medical student in Germany, must have known the terms, and as a reminder,
they most certainly were posted on the doors of these premises.
3.2.2. The History of the Birkenau Crematoria

On the very evening of his transfer to Crematorium II, Nyiszli comes to know
the history of the crematoria:
219
More usually spelled vetkőző- (“undressing”).
220
An earlier Bunker 1 allegedly was demolished in 1943. See Mattogno 2016a, pp. 173f. Note,
however, that in D45 Nyiszli does speak of an “underground bunker,” but it clearly is none other
than Leichenkeller 1 (Morgue #1) of Crematoria II and III!
“Over the course of our conversation I learn the history of the crematoria.
How tens of thousands of prisoners built these gigantic buildings out of stone
and concrete. How they had to complete them in harsh winter weather. Every
stone in these buildings is stained with the blood of tens of thousands of un-
lucky Jewish deportees. Starved and thirsty, inadequately clothed, nourished
with wretched gruel as their only food, they toiled day and night so that these
horrid factories of death could be completed and become the cremators of
their own bodies. Since then four years have passed.” (MBV, Chapter VI)
In one of his first articles about Auschwitz, however, French historian Jean-
Claude Pressac pointed out the following with regard to the construction of
the crematoria (Pressac 1982, p. 108, Note 107):
“The ‘Jahresbericht für Gesamtarbeitseinsatz’ (Annual report on total labor
deployment) indicates, for the work on Crematoria II, III, IV and V (B.W. 30,
30a, 30b, and 30c), 49,793 working days spread out over about six months,
which, despite the apparent enormity of the number, represents with regard to
one crematorium an effective average of only seventy persons per working
day, an observation which is confirmed by the daily hours summaries drawn
up by the [participating] firms.”
A letter from the head of the Auschwitz Central Construction Office (Zentral-
bauleitung) from February 20, 1943 in turn reveals that the two Kommandos
which worked on the construction of Crematoria II and III were comprised of
200 prisoners each.221
The notion that the crematoria were built by “tens of thousands of prison-
ers” is therefore absurd.
It should also be noted, in the interest of accuracy, that these structures
were built of bricks (not stone) and mortar. Moreover, as is universally
acknowledged, they were handed over to the camp administration between
March and June of 1943, in the following order:222
– Crematorium IV: March 22
– Crematorium II: March 31
– Crematorium V: April 4
– Crematorium III: June 25
For Nyiszli, on the other hand, the Birkenau crematoria had to be completed
“in harsh winter weather,” since which time “four years [had] passed” – a
chronology which would take their construction back to the winter of 1939-
1940, before the Auschwitz camp even existed!223
221
APMO, BW 30/34, p. 74.
222
These dates are derived from the “hand-over negotiations” (Übergabeverhandlung) with which
the Auschwitz Zentralbauleitung handed over control of the completed facilities to the camp
Kommandantur. RGVA, 502-2-54, p. 25, 77, 84; APMO, BW 30/25, p. 14.
223
The order for the establishment of the camp, according to D. Czech, was issued by Himmler on
April 27, 1940. Czech 1997, p. 8; 1989, p. 30.
3.2.3. Furnaces and Cremation Capacity

The history of the crematoria related in Nyiszli’s account comes from the sto-
ries of his companions in misfortune, and thus is a matter of indirect
knowledge. His descriptions of the crematoria facilities themselves, however,
are supposedly the eyewitness testimony of a person who lived in Crematori-
um II for months and who crossed the cremation hall innumerable times. And
he also went quite frequently to the other crematoria:
“For ongoing patient care, I am required to visit the individual crematoria
once per day – and in case of necessity, even twice – to call on the sick where
they lie. I am free to come and go among the four crematoria.” (MBV, Chap-
ter VI)
Notwithstanding this daily frequenting of the crematoria buildings, he knows
absolutely nothing about the cremation furnaces, and presents an extremely
fanciful description of them.
The cremation hall (Verbrennungsraum) of Crematoria II and III, which
according to Central Construction Office’s Blueprint No. 933 from January
19, 1942 and No. 2136 of February 22, 1943224 was thirty meters long, is de-
scribed by Nyiszli as being five times longer:
“The cremation hall is about 150 meters long, a brightly lit, white-washed,
concrete-floored space with enormous, iron-barred windows.” (MBV, Chapter
VII)
The hall itself, according to the documents, was furnished with five coke-fired
triple-muffle furnaces (Dreimuffel-Einäscherungsöfen) manufactured by the
Topf Company.225 A photograph taken by the SS in 1943 clearly shows their
structure (see Document 11).
Nyiszli, on the other hand, “saw” fifteen individual furnaces, that is, fifteen
muffles each built as a separate furnace unit:
“The fifteen cremation furnaces are installed separately in large red-brick
structures.” (MBV, Chapter VII)
Olleé shovels the coke.” (TVN)
However, since the furnaces operated on the gasifier principle, the coke was
not “shoveled” under the corpses at all. In a gasifier (or gas generator) system,
coke was subjected to partial combustion in a so-called gasifier compartment
in order to produce highly flammable CO gas, which then traveled through a
224
Reproduced in Pressac 1989, pp. 276f. and 305. See also Document 10 in the Appendix.
225
I have described these furnaces in detail in Mattogno/Deana, Part 1, pp. 265-279, Part 2, Docu-
ments 213-224 (pp. 371-378) and Part 3, Photographs 111-206 (pp. 82-132).
duct into the muffle where it combined with preheated outside air to complete
combustion, in the process heating the muffle to cremation temperature. The
gasifier itself was a vertical chamber lined with refractory material on the in-
side, with a hearth in its lower part consisting of a grate on which the coke
rested and a door for the admission of primary (partial) combustion air and the
removal of ashes and slag. In its upper part the chamber tapered off on one
side into the duct through which the partially combusted gas entered the muf-
fle (the “neck” of the gasifier); on the opposite side was a vertical or slanted
chute connected to the outside of the furnace through which the gasifier was
resupplied with fuel (the gasifier chute). Since the coke was, therefore, in an
entirely separate compartment of the furnace at all times – in the case of the
Topf double- and triple-muffle furnaces it was located behind the muffle – it
makes no sense to speak of shoveling it under the bodies lying in the muf-
fles.226
Curiously, this crude error can also be found in the April 13, 1945 deposi-
tion of another alleged Sonderkommando member, Stanisław Jankowski (alias
Alter Feinsilber), in his description of the Topf double-muffle furnaces of
Crematorium I (Czech et al. 1996, p. 37):
“The bodies lay on grills beneath which coke was burning.”
Nyiszli continues his description of the cremation hall as follows:
“From my room I hear loud orders, hurried footsteps. The noise is coming
from the furnace hall of the crematorium! They are making preparations for
receiving the transport. The whine of electric motors becomes audible. They
have turned on the giant blowers which fan the fire to the proper temperature
inside the furnaces. Fifteen blowrs of this kind are in operation at once! One is
installed next to each furnace.” (MBV, Chapter VII)
According to Nyiszli, there thus were fifteen blowers to fan the flames to the
correct temperature inside the furnaces.
In reality, however, the five triple-muffle furnaces of Crematoria II and III
were each provided with one forced-air blower (Druckluftgebläse), located as
shown in Document 13: two blowers were installed between Furnaces 1 and 2,
one attached to the right wall of Furnace 1, one attached to the left wall of
Furnace 2; two more were installed in the same way between Furnaces 3 and
4; and the last was located next to the left side of Furnace 5. There was noth-
ing “giant” about the blowers either; on the contrary, they were quite compact
in size, as can be seen from surviving examples of the same type installed on
the triple-muffle cremations furnaces at the Buchenwald Camp (see Document
14).
226
For a more detailed discussion of the gasifier principle see Mattogno/Deana, Part 1, pp. 34-36. A
photograph of gasifiers at the rear end of the Topf triple-muffle furnaces at Buchenwald is repro-
duced as Document 12 in the Appendix.
For Nyiszli, however, “The furnaces were heated with coke, and next to
erful electric motor” (PR)!
The blower’s output entered the muffle through dedicated ducts and served
to bring combustion air to the corpses. No equivalent blowers existed to fan
the coke fire in the gasifier hearths since incomplete combustion in fact was
the goal there. Provision could be made, however, to improve the draft from
the chimney through the use of a forced-draft device (Saugzug-Anlage). Orig-
inally, Crematorium II was provided with one, but it was dismantled between
May 17 and 19, 1943. In Crematorium III, no such device was ever installed,
and no provision was made for them at all in Crematoria IV and V (Mat-
togno/Deana, Part 1, pp. 228-251).
Elsewhere Nyiszli adds other fantastic elements to his account of the crem-
atoria:
“The crematoria are in a state of readiness. The men of the Sonderkommando
replace the refractory linings in the furnaces’ fire boxes. They paint the heavy
iron doors of the furnaces and oil their hinges. The dynamo and fans run all
day. Experts check their functioning.” (MBV, Chapter XXXI)
The replacement of the furnaces’ refractory lining could be done only by ex-
pert civilian personnel from the companies which had contributed to the con-
struction of the crematoria. For example, on May 21, 1943, the company Rob-
ert Koehler, which built the chimneys of Crematoria II and III, sent a letter to
the Central Construction Office with the subject “Repairs to the Lining in the
Chimney of Crem. II” (“Instandsetzung des Futters im Schornstein Krem. II”).
Workers from that firm began the job on June 19, and finished it some time
after July 17, probably in August (ibid., pp. 239-243).
Also, as I have noted above, there were no dynamos in Crematoria II and
III.
The four Birkenau crematoria were equipped with ten triple-muffle furnac-
es (five each in Crematoria II and III) and two eight-muffle furnaces (one each
in Crematoria IV and V), hence a total of twelve furnaces and forty-six muf-
fles. For Nyiszli, on the other hand, the facilities had a total of sixty furnaces:
“The cremation furnaces of Auschwitz and their equipment were built in a fac-
tory of the time, near the company Topf and Sons of Munich. This name was
on the doors of the 60 furnaces of the crematoria of Auschwitz, on the auto-
matic ash-extraction devices, and also on parts of the mechanism of the air-
draft register. With metal letters welded in a legible way.” (TVN)
In passing, it may also be remarked that the firm Topf and Sons (J.A. Topf &
Söhne) had its headquarters in Erfurt, not Munich, and that the emblem
“Topf” was not “welded” onto its products, but was rather created during the
casting of its cast-iron parts (ibid., Part 3, Photographs 58f., p. 55). Nor did the
Topf cremation furnaces have “automatic ash-extraction devices”; cremation
residues were removed manually using a simple scraper (Kratzer) via a special
ash-removal door (Ascheentnahmetür) located at the front of the furnace be-
neath the muffle door (ibid., Part 1, pp. 258, 271).
Here is Nyiszli’s description of the cremation process itself:
“After the last gold tooth is out of the mouth of its dead owner, the corpses go
to the cremation Kommando. These then place them three at a time on a push-
ing device made of steel plates. The furnace’s heavy iron doors open automat-
ically; the device moving on iron wheels rolls into the glowing furnace, drops
its load, slides back, heated to incandescence. Two men with rubber hoses
douse it with powerful streams of water.” (MBV, Chapter VII)
For the introduction of corpses into the muffle, Crematorium I of the Ausch-
witz Main Camp was provided with a “corpse-introduction device” (Leichene-
inführungs-Vorrichtung) consisting of a wheeled coffin-introduction cart
(Sargeeinführungswagen) which ran with iron wheels on special rails on the
floor (Laufschienen), and a semi-cylindrical pushing cart (Verschiebwagen)
made of steel plates that ran on top of it. At the front of the introduction cart
was a metal stretcher on which the corpse was laid; supported by a pair of
metal rollers (Laufrollen) attached below the muffle door,227 this stretcher
component entered the muffle as the introduction cart was rolled forward on
its rails. Once the stretcher was fully inside the furnace, the pushing cart
which rode on top of the stretcher extension was then held in place at the muf-
fle door, while the introduction cart was drawn backward on its rails again,
thus pushing the corpse off the stretcher onto the muffle grill (ibid., Part 1, pp.
272f., and Part 3, photographs 87-89, pp. 69f., and 185-187, pp. 120f.).
The “pushing device” made of “steel plates” mentioned by Nyiszli, which
specifically is “moving on iron wheels,” is clearly reminiscent of this stystem.
It is a fact, however, that this system was not used in the Birkenau crematoria.
Already on September 30, 1942, the Topf Company informed the Central
Construction Office that it had substituted the device described above with a
simple “wrought-iron stretcher” (schmiedeeiserne Trage) which would run on
the rollers attached to the muffle door frames.228
Furthermore, the muffle doors, which were each hung on a pair of hinges,
did not open “automatically” but rather manually, by pulling on the appropri-
ate handle.
The cremation capacity of the furnaces was, for Nyiszli, truly prodigious:
“The bodies of the dead are reduced to ashes in 20 minutes. The crematorium
works with 15 furnaces. This means the cremation of 5,000 people a day. Four
crematoria are in operation at the same capacity. Altogether 20,000 people
227
The rollers were mounted on a bar running the width of the furnace below the muffle doors and
could be slid along this bar beneath each muffle as needed; one pair of rollers thus served three
muffles. Mattogno/Deana 2015, Part 1, pp. 272f., and accompanying photographs in Part 3.
228
APMO, BW 30/34, p. 114, and BW 30/27, p. 30.
pass each day through the gas chambers and from there into the cremation
furnaces. The souls of twenty-thousand innocent people fly off through the gi-
gantic chimneys.” (MBV, Chapter VII)
In truth, however, the Topf double-, triple- and eight-muffle furnaces were all
designed for the cremation of only a single corpse at a time. The normal dura-
tion of the cremation process was about an hour. Attempting to overcome the
projected thermotechnical limits of the furnaces by overloading the muffles
(three bodies cremated together, as Nyiszli claims) would not in fact have led
to an increase in productivity; on the contrary, the maximum cremation capac-
ity for the furnaces was obtained, in conformity with their design, by placing a
single, normal corpse in each muffle.229 The theoretical maximum capacity of
the four Birkenau crematoria was 1,104 corpses in twenty-four hours; the an-
ticipated maximum was around 624 (operating twelve hours per day).230
Nyiszli’s claims in this regard thus can be qualified as a thermotechnical delir-
ium.
Apart from being technically absurd, the total cremation capacity asserted
by Nyiszli is mathematically wrong as well, because his claim that the corpses
were loaded into the muffles “three at a time” and then “reduced to ashes in 20
minutes” leads to a calculation of 3 corpses per load per muffle × 3 loads per
hour = 9 corpses per muffle per hour, or (9 corpses per muffle per hour × 15
muffles × 24 hours =) 3,240 corpses per day in one crematorium, not 5,000.
Moreover, if we accept for argument’s sake his claim that the crematoria all
had the same capacity (“Four crematoria are in operation at the same capaci-
ty”), the maximum capacity for all four sites would still have been 3,240 × 4 =
12,960 corpses per day, not 20,000. The details of Nyiszli’s own testimony
thus lead to a maximum cremation capacity of 7,040 less than he himself
claims.
In his letter to Paul Rassinier, Nyiszli responded in detail to the objections
of this pioneer of Holocaust revisionism:
“So the duration of the cremation is one thing at the Père Lachaise, and an-
other at Birkenau. This can last an hour in the first case, while it lasted no
more than twenty minutes in the second. The explanations are as follows: The
bodies of Père Lachaise were generally adequately nourished before their
death, and their incineration is accompanied by a solemn ceremony. Moreo-
ver, the duration of incineration is directly proportional to the intensity of the
heat, and inversely to the hygrometric degree [water content] of the object to
be incinerated. The corpses of Birkenau, due to the presence in ghettos, con-
centration camps, and due to inhuman work, were only skin and bones, walk-
ing skeletons, so to speak. The furnaces were heated with coke, and next to
229
Mattogno/Deana, Part 1, pp. 312-346 (Section II, Chapter 9, “The Cremation Capacity of the Fur-
naces in the Crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau”).
230
Ibid., pp. 292-311 (Section II, Chapter 8, “The Duration of the Cremation Process in the Topf
Furnaces at Auschwitz-Birkenau”).
erful electric motor. The incineration itself was not a ceremony, but an
‘Entloesung’ [recte: Endlösung], a conveyor-belt annihilation where every-
thing was used that modern technology can provide.”
Thus, according to Nyiszli’s presumed experience, well-fed corpses burn more
slowly than emaciated ones, when in fact the opposite is true, emaciated
corpses being less combustible precisely because of the smaller quantity of
combustible fat contained in them.
The duration of a cremation is not “directly proportional” to the tempera-
ture either, because the combustion process must occur within quite precise
thermal limits: below 600°C the body does not burn but instead carbonizes;
above 1100-1200°C, the phenomenon of sinterization can occur, whereby the
bones of the corpse fuse with and stick to the refractory brick of the cremation
grill.231 Nor is the duration inversely proportional to the quantity of water pre-
sent in the body, for a fat body undoubtedly has more water than a skinny one,
but it burns better than the latter.
The coke-fired cremation furnaces at the end of the nineteenth and begin-
ning of the twentieth centuries operated at a temperature of around 1000°C. In
the 1930s and 40s, coke-fired cremation furnaces operated at a lower tempera-
ture between 800-900°C, and reached temperatures of 1000-1100°C only for a
few minutes at the peak of the combustion process.232 The normal operating
temperature for a Topf furnace was around 800°C.233 As I have noted earlier,
the Topf furnaces at the Birkenau crematoria did not have enormous blowers
(“the height of one story”) to blow air into the furnaces, and so even this pre-
sumed advantage was non-existent, much as were the presumed disadvantages
of the crematorium at Père Lachaise relative to the funeral ceremony, which
obviously had no influence on the cremation process itself.
3.2.4. Flaming Chimneys

According to Nyiszli, the chimneys of the crematoria normally emitted giant
flames, something which he noted already on his first arrival at Birkenau:
“The first thing that draws my attention – rivets it, so to speak – is a gigantic
es from the the top of a factory-like, two-story building, also built of red
bricks.
It’s a strange shape for a factory chimney, but what is really impressive is the
column of fire 8-10 meters high which gushes from its mouth between the
lightning rods at its four corners.” (MBV, Chapter I)
231
Kessler 1930, pp. 136ff.
232
For a history of the early development of cremation technology and the experiments which led to
the eventual adoption of lower-temperature furnaces, see Mattogno/Deana, Part 1, pp. 43-73.
233
Betriebsvorschrift des koksbeheizten Topf-Dreimuffel-Einäscherungsofen. See Document 9.
This “observation” is then repeated at intervals throughout the book:

“I would love to know what is going on at the foot of its gigantic, blazing
chimney.” (MBV, Chapter VI)
“[…] were it not for the large red-brick building there and the enormous,
flame-spewing chimney at one end.” (MBV, Chapter VII)
“I look across: the chimneys of Crematoria II, III and IV are spewing forth
flames.” (MBV, Chapter IX)
“All through the night the chimneys of Crematoria I and II spewed flame from
themselves. Their glare lit up the entire camp!” (MBV, Chapter XXV)
“The north wind blows from the already snow-covered peaks of the Beskids, it
shakes the barbed wire of the K.Z. and agitates the flames of the crematoria
chimneys.” (MBV, Chapter XXVIII)
“[…] the first thing their glance fell upon when they came to from the cold wa-
ter poured on them was the smoke billowing over the K.Z. and the blazing
flames of the crematorium chimneys.” (MBV, Chapter XXVIII)
In his declaration of October 8, 1947, Nyiszli went even further:
“[…] the fires of the crematoria and of the two open graves that burned day
and night could be seen up to a distance of 30 kilometers.” (NI-11710)
In TVN he speaks also of “four columns of fire” which exit from the chim-
neys of the crematoria. Nyiszli appears to be unaware, among other things,
that Crematoria IV and V each had two chimneys such that the four cremato-
ria possessed six chimneys in all. Of course, the flaming chimneys themselves
are a simple fable anyway, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Mat-
togno/Deana, Part 1, pp. 375-379).
No less absurd is the alleged effect of these imagined flames:
“My glance wanders over the crematorium chimney: the lightning rods placed
at the square chimney’s four corners, all heavy iron rods, have melted from
the terrible fire and are now bent downwards.” (MBV, Chapter XIX)
Iron melts at 1,538°C and becomes forgeable at 900-1,000°C, at which tem-
perature it is sufficiently softened to be readily worked by hand. It follows,
then, that the fire at the mouth of the chimney must have been hotter than in
the furnace itself, which, according to the Operating Instructions, was around
800°C.
3.2.5. Access to the Crematoria and Repairs

In Chapter XXXI of his book, Nyiszli recounts the anecdote of two corpses
cooked in the crematorium courtyard in order to clean their skeletons.
Through this narrative, he adds the theme of (involuntary) cannibalism to his
catalog of Auschwitz horrors.
In this chapter, two Jews, father and son, who present some physical ab-
normalities, excite the interest of Dr. Mengele, who has them killed in order to
send their skeletons “to the anthropological museum in Berlin.” He asks

Nyiszli what methods he knows for removing the flesh from bones; Nyiszli
replies that he knows of two, namely, “the dissolving method, which consists
of placing the corpse in a calcium chloride solution” and “the cooking meth-
od,” or boiling in water. The latter method is chosen, and the corpses are
placed in two barrels and cooked. All this of course serves merely to introduce
the horrifying scene of cannibalism. For this, Nyiszli needed some outsiders
who would have been unaware of the goings-on in the crematorium. And here
is his solution:
“Today nothing is in operation. Four stonemason prisoners brought here from
Auschwitz I are repairing the crematorium’s chimney.”
There is nothing in the documents, however, regarding damage to the chimney
of Crematorium II in 1944. More important, any repairs that were necessary
would have been done by the Koehler firm, which built the crematoria’s
chimneys, as can be inferred from a letter of May 9, 1944 in which the Birke-
nau Bauleiter (Head of Construction) asks the camp commandant for “permis-
sion to access Crematoria I-IV” (“Genehmigung zum Betreten der Krematori-
en I-IV”) on behalf of said firm, as it had been tasked “with urgent repair work
in the crematoria” (“mit dringenden Instandsetzungsarbeiten bei den Krema-
torien”).234 Likewise, on May 13, the Head of Construction wrote to the camp
commandant of Auschwitz II/Birkenau:235
“The bricklayer Apolinary Golinski, born Aug. 5, 1904, has been tasked by the
Koehler firm with repair work in the crematoria. It is hereby requested that his
provisional pass be provided with a permit to to enter the same.”
In Point 12 of his declaration of October 8, 1947, Nyiszli claims that on one
occasion the Topf firm
“sent a specialist to review the devices. He was a man of at least 60 years. I
exchanged a few words with him, in my opinion he was an engineer in the uni-
form of an SS Oberscharführer. This way it was also possible for IG people to
show up at Auschwitz and to remain unrecognized.” (NI-11710)
Later, in his fictitious testimony at the I.G. Farben Trial, he further elaborated
on this story:
“Once this company sent a specialist to overhaul the devices in the cremato-
ria. He was a person of about 60 and wore the uniform of an SS Ober-
scharführer. Being a concentration-camp inmate already knowledgible in
these matters, I realized that this man had been wearing the uniform only since
recently. He moved in it in a strange, unusual way. The uniform did not even
suit him well. He did not even know where to put the heavy revolver hanging
from his belt; it was an impediment to him. His age and all his behavior re-
234
RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 377.
235
RGVA, 502-1-83, p. 375.
vealed that the SS uniform served him only to be able to move freely in the
concentration camp and to disguise himself as a person.
I conversed with him several times. In my opinion, he was an engineer dressed
as an SS [man] as a member of the big factory Topf and Sons, Munich, who
had installed the crematorium.
It is also probable that staff members of the I.G. Farben walked around in the
main camp and in the crematoria concealing their identity under the SS uni-
form.” (TVN)
The prosecution at the trial was interested in the presence of I.G. Farben offi-
cials in the Birkenau crematoria, because in that case the defendants could not
claim to have had no knowledge of the presumed gassings there. It was in this
context that Nyiszli presumably invented the story above.
It is a well-known fact that chief engineer (Oberingenieur) Kurt Prüfer, di-
rector of Department DIV Ofenbau (furnace construction) of the Topf firm,
was the expert responsible for the Auschwitz cremation furnaces, and that he
came to the camp in this capacity on at least twelve occasions. The last was in
February 1944. On January 20, 1944, the Central Construction Office contact-
ed the Topf Company requesting Prüfer’s presence at Auschwitz. On February
2, SS Obersturmführer Werner Jothann, the new head of the Central Construc-
tion Office, wrote a letter to Camp Commandant SS Obersturmbannführer Ar-
thur Liebehenschel with the subject “Identity documents for Chief Engineer
Prüfer and Mr. Holick of the firm Topf and Sons, Erfurt.”236 Prüfer and the ci-
vilian workers of other firms like Koehler entered the crematoria on the basis
of explicit orders from the camp commandant, and the very notion that they
presented themselves disguised in SS uniforms is fatuous and absurd.
3.2.6. Demolition of the Crematoria

Describing the results of the Sonderkommando revolt in Chapter XXIX of his
book, Nyiszli writes that “Crematorium III had burned to ashes and Cremato-
rium IV was put out of operation as a result of the destruction of its machin-
ery.”
At some point in the weeks to follow, however, Crematorium IV (V in to-
day’s nomenclature) must have been repaired, for when the decision is made
to demolish the other crematoria after the order halting any killings on No-
vember 17, Crematorium IV (V) alone is left in service:
“Among the crematoria, two will be demolished; the third will remain for the
time being for the cremation of the camp dead. We four will be moving […] to
Crematorium IV. It will remain in operation.” (MBV, Chapter XXXVI)
Moreover, in relating the story of the Polish prisoners killed at the building on
New Year’s Day 1945, he speaks merely of “cremations” (not open-air burn-
236
RGVA, 502-1-345, p. 50.
ings), which are carried out after the prisoners have duly undressed in “the
empty room beside the furnace hall” (XXXVII). It would thus seem most like-
ly that Nyiszli imagined the damage to Crematorium IV (V) itself as having
been repaired.
On the other hand, in Danuta Czech’s quasi-official chronicle of events at
the Auschwitz camp, she affirms that only Crematorium IV (Nyiszli’s III) was
damaged, since “Afterward work [was] resumed in Crematoriums II, III and
V” (Czech 1997, p. 726; 1989, p. 900).
Later, after the alleged Himmler order prohibiting further killings had been
received at the camp, and after the alleged liquidation of the last Sonderkom-
mando, Nyiszli describes the plans for the dismantling of the crematoria as
follows:
“We four will be moving […] to Crematorium IV. It will remain in operation. I
and II are marked for immediate destruction! Crematorium III of course
burned to ashes on the occasion of the Sonderkommando revolt of October 6.
It was at once a historic and a happy moment when, the next morning, a de-
tachment of prisoners deploying a thousand persons arrived in the courtyard
of Crematorium I and, divided into groups, began the demolition of the build-
ing with the bloody past.” (MBV, Chapter XXXVI)
The exact number of prisoners assigned to work on the demolition is unclear,
but almost certainly less than the 1,000 claimed by Nyiszli. Based on docu-
ments, Czech states that the first demolition unit (Abbruchkommando), as-
signed to work on Crematorium III, was established on December 1, 1944,
and consisted of 100 female prisoners. In a footnote she adds with reference to
a statement by the ex-detainee Stanisława Rachwałowa that at the same time a
male unit was also created.237
On December 5, the women’s unit was increased to 150 prisoners.238 In a
letter of December 8, 1944 to the headquarters of the women’s camp (Kom-
mandantur des FL), the head of the Central Construction Office, SS Ober-
sturmführer Werner Jothann, requested to make available “100 unskilled fe-
male workers for demolition work at crematorium Camp II.”239 Finally, on
January 15, 1945 a “demolition unit Crematorium 104-B” existed that consist-
ed of 70 men.240 The order of magnitude of the documented figures makes it
possible to relegate to the realm of fantasy Nyiszli’s claim that the demolition
unit was made up of “a detachment of prisoners deploying a thousand per-
sons.”
237
Czech 1997, p. 757; 1989, p. 939; as source she cites “Arbeitslisten”, evidently the one of Dec. 1,
1944.
238
Ibid., 1997, pp. 759; 1989, pp. 940; again with the general reference “Arbeitslisten.”
239
“100 Häftlingshilfsarbeitern für Abbrucharbeiten beim Krematorium Lager II.” RGVA, 502-1-67,
p. 227.
240
“K.L. Birkenau. Arbeitseinsatz für den 15. Januar 1945.” RGVA, 502-1-67, p. 17
3.3. Extermination Technology: the “Gas Chambers”

3.3.1. Zyklon B
Nyiszli always calls Zyklon B “Cyclon” and talks about it in these terms:
“They punch open the patented top of one of the canisters and pour the con-
tents, a substance consisting of bean-sized purple granules, into the opening.
The material poured out is Cyclon, or chlorine in granular form; it immediate-
ly gives off gas as soon as it comes into contact with air.” (MBV, Chapter VII)
In D45, he wrote that Zyklon B consisted of “bean-sized, purple [or rather]
burgundy-colored chlorine pellets” and adds that the “gas pellets fell, and
right on contact with air developed chlorine gas that caused the most-cruel
death by suffocation within 5 to 10 minutes.” In Document NI-11710, the
“Cyclon” is “in granular form with pink-lilac color”; in his book, Nyiszli
states that it consisted of “bean-sized lilac-colored granules.”
Document NI-9912, from which I will quote later, states that the carrier
material was either diatomaceous earth (Diagrieß), “a grainy mass of reddish-
brown color” (“eine rotbraunekörnige Masse”), or “blue cubes” (“kleine blaue
Würfel (Erco)”] of gypsum (the most common type during the war).
From five deliveries of Zyklon B by the Dessauer Werke to the Degesch
Company of April-May 1944 (NI-9913A), it emerges that the inert carrier
substance consisted of cubes of gypsum called Erco-Würfel. The fact that the
“Erco” gypsum cubes had a light blue color is confirmed by an expertise on a
200 g Zyklon B can made by a British military laboratory on December 17,
1944. The can contained 450 grams of calcium sulfate cubes (gypsum) of a
light-blue color soaked in hydrogen cyanide.241
In his dreamed-up story published in Világ, Nyiszli invents an “Umleitung-
sstelle 9” having a department “GG,” or “Giftgas” (toxic gas); these gases al-
legedly included “Cyclon A” and “Cyclon B,” which were “Geheimmittel,”
secret substances whose composition was known only to some chemical
chiefs.
The “Cyclon A” cans were allegedly labeled “Cyclon A. Vertilgungsmittel
für Läuse und andere Ungeziehfer. Vorsicht. Gift! (Pest control agent for lice
and other pests. Caution: Poison!).” Nyiszli claims that this type of gas was
used for disinfestation, and that he was an eyewitness to its use in “the disin-
festation chamber of Camp F at Birkenau.” The “Cyclon B” cans, Nyiszli in-
sisted, were identical to those of “Cyclon A,” except for the A having been
swapped for a B. More rarely used were cans without any label, which con-
tained chlorine, Nyiszli stated.
241
TNA, WO-208/2169.
If we follow him, “Cyclon B” was used for extermination purposes in “gas

chambers”; it was “a chemical combination of acidum hydrocianatum [hydro-
gen cyanide], chlorine and in all probability nitrogen in a way whose chemical
formula” was unknown to Nyiszli, for it was secret; the carrier material was
“calcium silicate.” Nyiszli adds:
“The toxic substance, at the moment of the actual contact with air – probably
absorbing its oxygen – becomes gaseous from the solid state and fills the
available space (light gas) very quickly, leaving the supporting substance un-
changed in its external appearance.”
The 1962 English Panther edition of Nyiszli’s book contains the following
note of the translator (Tibère Kremer) on page 87:
“In reply to a query concerning the origin and composition of cyclon gas, Dr.
Nyiszli wrote that it was manufactured during the war by the I.G. Farben Co.
and that, although it was classified as Geheimmittel, that is, confidential or
secret, he was able to ascertain that the name ‘cyclon’ came from the abbrevi-
ation of its essential elements: cyanide, chlorine and nitrogen. During the Nu-
remberg trials the Farben Co. claimed that it had been manufactured only as a
disinfectant. However, as Dr. Nyiszli pointed out in his testimony, there were
two types of cyclon in existence, type A and type B. They came in identical
containers; only the marking A and B differentiated them. Type A was a disin-
fectant; type B was used to exetrminate millions.”
On the role of I.G. Farben, Nyiszli asserted in his invented trial testimony:
What Nyiszli wrote about Zyklon is wrong from beginning to end, incredibly
wrong, systematically wrong.
I start with his claim that in 1944 a certain “Zyklon A” was in use at
Auschwitz for “disinfection,” meaning disinfestation, while “Zyklon B” was
used for homicidal purposes. Flury and Zernik, in their voluminous treatise on
toxic substances, inform us that “Zyklon A” was a liquid consisting of a mix-
ture of methyl and ethyl cyanoformiate with the addition of 10% of methyl
chloroformiate as a warning agent; then they add (Flury/Zernik 1931, p. 535):
“The production of liquid Zyklon[242] in Germany had to be terminated when
the peace treaty of Versailles came into effect, because during the war the cy-
anoformiates had been tested as combat chemicals, and therefore their further
production is forbidden according to the terms of the treaty.”
Gerhard Peters provides even the physical characteristics of this substance: the
liquid mixture boiled at 96°C and had a relative density of 1.08 with respect to
water, and as a gas of a relative density of 2.98 with respect to air. The liquid
242
Meaning Zyklon A; right after this they write about Zyklon B as being “fest,” solid.
was vaporized and sprayed at a pressure of 5-10 atmospheres with a device

similar to a shoulder sprayer for plants (Pflanzenspritze; Peters 1933, pp. 56-
58).
The above allows us to evaluate the reliability of Nyiszli’s “eyewitness tes-
timony”: he not only “saw” the use of a product that had been no longer on the
market for over two decades, but he also “saw” this happening at “the disin-
festation chamber of Camp F at Birkenau,” although the Birkenau Camp Sec-
tor BIIf never had a disinfestation chamber. Furthermore, Nyiszli describes
the alleged disinfestation with Zyklon A in this way:
“They poured down the contents of the cans through chimney-like openings
onto clothes and blankets piled up in the hermetically sealed disinfestation
chamber [that was] here in the hospital camp.” (TVN)
Such a procedure could have worked with “Zyklon B” granules, but certainly
not with liquid “Zyklon A,” which required a sprayer to atomize the liquid.
Summing up, “Zyklon A” no longer existed, there was no disinfestation
chamber in the hospital sector BIIf, and the way “Zyklon A” was allegedly
applied there is nonsensical: three blatant lies in one single swoop!
Being a liquid substance, it is very unlikely that “Zyklon A” was packed in
cans. I do not know if it ever had a label saying something like “Pest control
agent for lice and other pests. Caution: Poison!,” but it is certain that, contrary
to what Nyiszli asserts, this was certainly not what the label on Zyklon B cans
stated. In fact, its label read:
“Zyklon B. Toxic gas! Cyanide preparation! Keep in a cold and dry place!
Protect from the sun and open flames. To be opened and used only by trained
personnel.”
As a means of extermination, Zyklon A had also been mentioned by the Sovi-
et prosecutor Pokrovsky during the afternoon session of February 14, 1946 of
the Nuremberg IMT (IMT, Vol. VII, pp. 438f.):
“All these monstrous crimes had a definite system of their own. There was uni-
formity in the murder methods: One and the same system prevailed in the con-
struction of the gas chambers, in the mass production of the round tins con-
taining the poisonous substances ‘Cyclone A’ or ‘Cyclone B,’ the furnaces of
the crematories are all built on the same typical lines, […].”
The claim of homicidal use of “Zyklon A” was reiterated by the Soviets dur-
ing the trial against the Sachsenhausen camp staff, which was staged in Berlin
from October 23 to November 1, 1947.243
It is possible that Nyiszli learned about this in some way.
As he describes it, it is clear that Nyiszli knew practically nothing about
Zyklon B. His statement that it was some ominous “secret substance” and
consequently had a secret composition is simply pathetic. He who claimed to
243
See in this regard Mattogno 2016e, Chapter 10 on Sachsenhausen, pp. 151-181.
have participated as a witness at the I.G. Farben Trial, even playing a leading
role in it, was completely ignorant of the fact that precisely during that trial
documents were presented that provided all the relevant data about Zyklon B,
its composition, its characteristics and its methods of use. In particular, two
documents must be mentioned in this context: the one filed as NI-9098 is a
1942 booklet titled “Eight lectures from Degesch’s area of activity” (“Acht
Vorträge aus dem Arbeitsgebiet der Degesch”), given by experts on disinfes-
tation with highly toxic substances such as Gerhard Peters, Ludwig Gasser,
Erich Wüstinger and Walter Rasch.
In the lecture “Development and Extension of the 9 DEGESCH proce-
dures” (“Entwicklung und Ausbau der 9 DEGESCH-Verfahren”), Heinrich G.
Sossenheimer provided this general information (NI-9098, p. 15):
“The following types of Zyklon are in use today:
ZYKLON (hydrogen cyanide), liquid hydrogen cyanide soaked in burnt diato-
maceous earth (Diagrieß) or in an artificial substance containing gypsum
(Erco), and ZYKLON discoids, liquid hydrogen cyanide soaked in wood-fiber
discs.
Among its areas of employment are the gasification of large spaces of bar-
racks, troop lodgings, camps of the labor services, mills, granaries, ships, and
the delousing of troops and foreign civilian workers in fumigation chambers,
in addition to work of protecting stores of all kinds.
Since 1924, almost a quarter billion cubic meters of space has been disinfested
with Zyklon. Of these, some 100 million cubic meters were done in Germany
alone.”
Later, a “Diagram of a fumigation-chamber facility with 8 cells” (“Schema
einer Begasungskammer-Anlage mit 8 Zellen”) is reproduced, which is a
standard hydrogen cyanide disinfestation system with the Degesch circulation
system (Kreislaufanlage for circulating the gas mixture; ibid., p. 20).
The second document, filed at Nuremberg as NI-9912, contains the
“Guidelines for the Use of Prussic Acid (Zyklon) for Destruction of Vermin
(Disinfestation)” (“Richtlinien für die Anwendung von Blausäure (Zyklon) zur
Ungeziefervertilgung (Entwesung)”] Published by the Health Authority of the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Prague (Gesundheitsanstalt des
Protektorates Böhmen und Mähren in Prag). The first two points illustrate the
physical characteristics of hydrogen cyanide and the methods of use of Zyklon
B:244
“II. Forms in which Prussic Acid is used:
Zyklon is a mixture of Prussic acid and an irritating agent absorbed in a sub-
strate. The substrate may be wood disks, a granular red-brown material (“Di-
agriess”) or small blue cubes (“Erco”).
244
NI-9912, p. 1. See the complete translation in Rudolf 2016, pp. 117-124.
The irritating agent is used as a warning method, and has the additional ad-
vantage that it stimulates the breathing of insects. Release of Prussic acid and
the irritating agent by simple evaporation. Zyklon will keep for 3 months. Use
damaged cans first. Always use up the contents of a can completely. Liquid
Prussic acid harms polish, varnish, paints, and so on – gaseous Prussic acid
will not. The toxicity of Prussic acid is not affected by the irritating agent, but
the danger is reduced.
Zyklon can be made harmless by burning.”
Zyklon B was so “secret” that a British military court staged a trial that was
called “The Zyklon B Case. Trial of Bruno Tesch and two others” (March 1-8,
1946).245 The indictment, taken from this publication, became Document NI-
12207 of the I.G. Farben Trial. Among other things, we read there:246
“The chief gas involved was Zyklon B, a highly dangerous poison gas, 99 per
cent. of which was prussic acid.”
For Nyiszli, however, Zyklon B consisted of “chlorine in granular form” (in
his book, Chapter 7), but even in this regard, he had rather confused ideas, for
in TVN he wrote that it was “a chemical combination of acidum hydro-
cianatum,247 chlorine and in all probability nitrogen” with “calcium silicate” as
carrier material instead of the actual calcium sulfate (gypsum).
What Tibère Kremer claims to have learned from Nyiszli about the name
Zyklon is a rich joke at best. According to this, Nyiszli had managed to find
out “that the name ‘cyclon’ came from the abbreviation of its essential ele-
ments: cyanide, chlorine and nitrogen,” accumulating three huge inanities in
one stroke.
First of all, the proper spelling of the term is “Zyklon,” which Nyiszli nev-
er used, as I mentioned earlier; the alleged acronym should therefore contain
the initial “Zy” of the Germanized “Zyanid” for cyanide. Second, Zyklon B
did not contain chlorine and nitrogen (other than the nitrogen contained in cy-
anide: CN). Third, the German name for Nitrogen is “Stickstoff”; “nitrogen”
is the English name!
Nyiszli states in Chapter 7 of his book that Zyklon B “immediately gives
off gas as soon as it comes into contact with air,” in D45 that “right on contact
with air [it] developed chlorine gas,” and finally in TVN that the “toxic sub-
stance, at the moment of the actual contact with air – probably absorbing its
oxygen – becomes gaseous from the solid state.”
Ignorant of the fact that the active ingredient of Zyklon B was liquid hy-
drogen cyanide, Nyiszli did not even know that the gas (hydrogen-cyanide va-
pors) developed by simple evaporation of the liquid; the process is similar to
the evaporation of water, but the boiling point of hydrogen cyanide is much
245
Summarized in: United Nations… 1947, Vol. I, pp. 93-103.
246
NI-12207, p. 94 of the publication.
247
Recte: “hydrocianicum.”
lower. Air or oxygen is not required for this evaporation to occur. The above-
mentioned “Guidelines for the Use of Prussic Acid (Zyklon) for Destruction
of Vermin (Disinfestation)” list the physical properties of hydrogen cyanide,
including its boiling point (26°C) and its relative density with respect to air
(0.97).
The active involvement of oxygen in the development of the gas was part
of the Auschwitz fable that circulated among inmates and must also have
reached Rudolf Höss’s ears. On April 24, 1946, while sitting in his Nuremberg
prison cell, he wrote a note on the alleged extermination technique at Ausch-
witz (filed as T/1170 during the Jerusalem Eichmann Trial), in which he de-
fined “Cyclon B” as
“a crystal-like hydrogen cyanide which evaporated instantly, meaning that it
became effective instantly on contact with oxygen,”
The crystalline nature of Zyklon B was another very common fable. In his
declaration of April 5, 1946, Höss again defined it as “a crystallized Prussic
acid” (PS-3868), and in 1979, Filip Müller, whom the orthodoxy considers to
be one of the most important witnesses of the alleged gassings at Auschwitz,
still wrote of “Zyklon-B crystals” (“Zyklon-B-Kristalle,” Müller 1979a, p.
184).
A sample of a Zyklon-B gypsum pellet, examined with a scanning electron
microscope (magnified by a factor of 2,500), “clearly shows a microcrystal-
line structure with orthorhombic crystals that are approximately 1.5 microme-
ters wide and 7 to 15 micrometers long.”
The author of this study is a well-known holocaust propagandist who states
(Mazal):
“Many historians describe the Zyklon-B used in the gas and delousing cham-
bers as being crystals of diatomaceous earth, even though diatomaceous earth
is invariably presented as a fine powder rather than ‘crystals’ or pellets. This
has given rise to speculation by Holocaust deniers who seek out the smallest
gap in any description in order to attack the body of an otherwise well-
founded text.”
Mazal’s accusation against “Holocaust deniers” is pathetic, as is clear from
this study, where I show that Nyiszli’s testimony does not contain merely a
few “small gaps” or inaccuracies, but his entire text is completely unfounded.
Although Mazal’s reference to “crystals” of Zyklon B is not very clear,
from the context it seems that he wants to justify witness statements on this. If
so, we ought to keep in mind that a micrometer corresponds to one thousandth
of a millimeter. Hence, the microcrystalline structure in question has dimen-
sions ranging between 1.5 and 15 thousandths of a millimeter, meaning that it
could not be seen with the naked eye. Since no technical publication on
Zyklon B of the 1940s spoke of this microcrystalline structure, we must de-
duce that the witnesses turned to a concentration camp equipped with a scan-
ning electron microscope capable of magnification factors of 2,500 and more

– never mind the fact that scanning electron microscopes have been available
as commercial products only since 1965248! But this all relates only to the car-
rier material of the Erco-type Zyklon B – gypsum – whose microcrystalline
nature has been known to chemists and mineralogists long before WWII.
Höss, however, spoke of “a crystallized Prussic acid,” hence the active ingre-
dient, not the carrier material.
One last error remains to be examined. Nyiszli states:
In reality, however, the I.G. Farbenindustrie Trust never “delivered” any
Zyklon B. It was only a 42.5% shareholder of the DEGESCH (Deutsche Ge-
sellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, German Company for Pest Control); the
other two shareholders were DEGUSSA (Deutsche Gold- und Silberscheide-
anstalt) of Frankfurt upon Main (42.5%) and Theo Goldschmidt of Essen
(15%). DEGESCH in turn held 51% of the capital of the HELI Company
(Heerdt und Lingler) and 55% (until 1942) of the TESTA Company (Tesch
und Stabenow; NI-6363, NI-12073). These two companies distributed Zyklon
B on behalf of DEGESCH; the former had commercial jurisdiction for territo-
ries west of the Elbe River, the other for territories east of it. Zyklon B was
produced on behalf of DEGESCH by two companies: the Dessauer Werke für
Zucker-Raffinerie (Dessau plant for sugar refinery) and the Kaliwerke AG in
Kolin. TESTA also delivered Zyklon B to Auschwitz, but it is not known that
Zyklon B was also delivered to the Treblinka Camp. For the present purpose,
however, this can be ruled out, because Nyiszli exclusively referred to sup-
plies for extermination purposes, yet the alleged gas chambers of Treblinka
are said to have operated with engine-exhaust gases.
As I will show below, Nyiszli’s pathetic lies about Zyklon B are not means
without an end, but rather constitute the backbone of his “eye”-witness testi-
mony of the presumed homicidal gassings.
3.3.2. The “Gas Chambers”

In Chapter VII of his book,249 Nyiszli describes in great detail the “gassing” of
a convoy of Jews in Crematorium I (= II in today’s numbering system).
“The long-drawn-out wail of a locomotive’s whistle sounds from the ramp. It’s
daybreak! I go to my window, where I have a clear view across. A long train is
standing there. Within a few minutes, the doors are flung to one side and the
248
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_electron_microscope
249
Unless indicated otherwise, the following quotes are all taken from this chapter.
wagons disgorge from within themselves the chosen people of Israel. Lining up
and selection take half an hour at most.”
In the first, German edition of her “Kalendarium” of Auschwitz, Czech, with
explicit reference to Jewish transports from Hungary, wrote much more sensi-
bly (Czech 1964, p. 97, Note 80):
“The unloading of a train lasted 4-5 hours.”
“After five or six minutes,” those selected for the “gas chamber” enter the
courtyard of Crematorium II, and descend a staircase “ten or twelve concrete
steps lead below the ground to a large room, upon the façade of which hangs
an enormous sign stating in German, French, Greek and Hungarian that this is
a ‘Bath and Disinfection Room.’”
“They go down the steps almost cheerfully.
The room into which the transport is conducted is about 200 meters long,
starkly illuminated and painted white. A line of columns stretches down the
middle of the room to the end. Benches are arranged around each column and
along the walls as well. Above the benches are long lines of hooks, above the
hooks are numbers.”
This is the alleged “undressing room.” On Blueprints #932 and #1301 of the
Auschwitz Central Construction Office, this room is labeled as “Leichenkeller
2” (Basement Morgue #2) and measures 49.49 m × 7.93 m, hence 392.5 m²
(Pressac 1989, pp. 284-287, 292f.).
One cannot seriously believe that Nyiszli could misjudge the room’s length
by a factor of 4.
“Three thousand people are in the room. Men, women, children.”
In his first statement (D45), Nyiszli narrated this alleged event as follows:
“In a few minutes, the crowd on the left started to move slowly to the left, car-
rying their personal belongings. The crematoria were around 200 meters from
the Judenrampe, and the crowd of approximately 2000 people passed under
the gate of Crematoria 1, 2, 3 or 4 as ordered. At the crematorium, they de-
scended 10-12 concrete steps and entered an empty, underground room with a
capacity of 2000 [people]. The first row stopped instinctively at the entrance,
but once they read the signs ‘Disinfection’ and ‘Bath’ printed in all major lan-
guages, they were reassured and descended the steps.”
As we can see, the initial capacity of the “undressing room” was 2,000 people.
Continuing his narration, Nyiszli writes:
“SS soldiers arrive and immediately the order rings out: everyone is to un-
dress completely, ten minutes! They stand petrified, old folks, grandfathers,
grandmothers, children, wives, husbands. Modest matrons and maidens look
at one another helplessly. Perhaps they did not understand the German
words? But already the order is repeated! Its tone is more impatient now, al-
most menacing!”
However, the victims were Hungarians, most of whom could not understand
the German words. The scene allegedly took place after Nyiszli had spent his
first night at the crematorium, if we follow his fictitious chronology, hence in
early June 1944. At that time, however, no Jewish transport arrived from
Germany.
“They begin to undress with difficulty. A group sent from the Sonderkomman-
do assists in the undressing of the aged, the lame and the mad. In ten minutes
everyone is naked.”
That 3,000 people could undress within 10 minutes in a room of merely 392.5
m², or seven to eight persons per square meter, is indeed nothing short of dif-
ficult. But of course, Nyiszli had in mind a room 200 meters long with a vastly
larger surface area.
“The SS clear a path through the dense crowd to the oak double doors located
at the end of the room. They open them! The crowd surges through them into
the next room, also brightly lit. This room is the same size as the undressing
room, but there are no benches and hooks here.”
Since Nyiszli claimed that the “undressing room” was 200 meters long, this
would also have been the length of the alleged “gas chamber.” The blueprints
of Crematoria II (and III) give for Morgue #1 (Leichenkeller 1), the alleged
“gas chamber,” a size of 30 m × 7 m, in total 210 m². Here Nyiszli’s estimat-
ing “error” amounts to a factor of 6.7! In his response to Rassinier’s criticism,
Nyiszli conceded that he might have been wrong about the sizes of the rooms,
but when “correcting” it, he still gave a size that was way too large:
“It could therefore be that the halls were only 100 or 120 meters long. This
does not change anything about the facts, and can not possibly challenge the
authenticity of the data.” (see here on page 176)
This does change a lot, however, because it indicates that Nyiszli never set
foot in these “rooms.”
Based on Nyiszli’s description, the “undressing room” and the “gas cham-
ber” were two adjoining rooms; from the first, one entered directly into the
second through “oak double doors” located at the end of the room. The blue-
prints of these crematoria, and in particular Blueprint 109/15 of September 24,
1943, show that at the end opposite of the entry stairs, Morgue #2 narrowed
down to a corridor just 1.97 meters wide and 5.30 meters long. At the end of
this corridor was a two-leaf door measuring 2.10 m × 1.80 m, which gave ac-
cess to the vestibule (Vorraum). This vestibule had on one side the corpse
chute (Leichenrutsche) in the center of a staircase leading outdoors, and on the
other the elevator (Aufzug) leading into the ground-level furnace room.
Morgue #1 was arranged perpendicular to Morgue #2 and was accessed
through a double door.
“In the center of the room, at a distance of thirty meters from each other, a
number of columns stretch from the concrete floor to the ceiling. These are not
support columns, but are rather quadrangular tinplate pipes, their sides
pierced throughout with holes like a grill.”
Since in Nyiszli’s mind the room was 200 meters long, there would have been
at least six of these “columns” at a distance of 30 meters from each other. Ac-
cording to orthodox holocaust historiography, there are said to have been four
devices for introducing Zyklon B. The most important witness described them
as wire-mesh columns with a square section of about 70 cm × 70 cm and a
height of about 3 m.250 This wire-mesh structure was represented by Pressac in
a fairly accurate drawing.251 Nyiszli’s testimony is therefore irreconcilable
with the official version.
“At that moment, an automobile roars outside. A luxury model Red Cross car
arrives. An SS officer and an S.D.G. Sanitätsdienstgefreiter, a non-commis-
sioned medical officer, step out. The medic has four green-colored canisters in
his hands.
They advance across the lawn to where some low concrete chimneys emerge
from the ground at a distance of thirty meters from one another. They head for
the first chimney. They don gas masks. They lift the chimney cover; it too is
made of concrete. They punch open the patented top of one of the canisters
and pour the contents, a substance consisting of bean-sized lilac-colored
granules, into the opening. The material poured out is Cyclon, or chlorine in
granular form; it immediately gives off gas as soon as it comes into contact
with air. It falls down into the perforated sheet-metal pipes into the under-
ground room. It stays there in the pipe; it does not scatter all over. The gas
immediately comes out through the holes, and within moments it fills the room
crowded with people. Within five minutes it kills them!”
Had the room been 200 meters long, it would have had at least six columns
and just as many “concrete chimneys,” but there were only four cans of
Zyklon B, and into each “opening” the contents of one can was poured. At
least 2 “chimneys” therefore would have remained unused.
Pressac claimed that the four “Drahtnetzeinschiebevorrichtungen” (wire-
mesh push-in devices) mentioned in the basement inventory attached to the
hand-over protocol of Crematorium II dated March 31, 1943 are proof of the
existence of Zyklon-B introduction devices. The inventory also listed four
“Holzblenden” (wooden screens or blinds), which Pressac translated as
“wooden covers” allegedly used to close the chimneys.252 So these alleged
250
See in this regard my study “The Elusive Holes of Death,” in: Rudolf/Mattogno 2017, pp. 291-
407, esp. pp. 316-319, “The Testimony of Michał Kula.”
251
Pressac 1989, p. 487; a more precise drawing can be found in Rudolf 2017, pp. 147-158; esp. pp.
150f.
252
Pressac 1989, p. 429; see in this regard Mattogno 2015a, Chapter 2.5., pp. 83-93.
“covers” of the “chimneys” were made of wood, while Nyiszli insists they
were made of concrete.
It is moreover known that these devices are listed in the inventory as part
of Morgue #2, the “undressing room,” not Morgue #1, the alleged “gas cham-
ber,” so Pressac was forced to carry out a little sleight of hand to attribute
these devices to the “gas chamber.” It is furthermore known that these devices
do not appear at all in the inventory of the hand-over protocol of Crematorium
III of June 24, 1943.253
The abbreviation “S.D.G.” (SDG) stood for Sanitätsdienstgrad, not Sani-
tätsdienstgefreiter, and referred to an SS medical orderly. The “Erco” gypsum
pellets that were the carrier material of Zyklon B were slightly bluish, not lilac
or even burgundy.
In his first statement (D45), Nyiszli described the scene as follows:
“The heavy oak doors were shut behind them, the lights were turned off, and
in a few minutes a luxury car with the Red Cross insignia arrived. A doctor
with the rank of captain and his assistant unloaded four metal containers
weighing approximately 1 kg each. They removed the four concrete lids cover-
ing the ventilation shafts leading to the underground bunker; they put on their
gas masks, punctured the lid of the metal containers, and dumped the bean-
sized, purple [or rather] burgundy-colored chlorine pellets into the four open-
ings. Then they immediately covered the openings with the concrete covers.”
Here the “chimneys” were therefore “ventilation shafts.” If there were four of
them at intervals of 30 m, they were arranged along a line of 90 meters, leav-
ing the remaining 110 meters of the 200-m-long “gas chamber” without any
Zyklon-B-introduction openings. I have already elaborated on the “chlorine”
and the color of the pellets.
In his 1945 declaration, Nyiszli says (D45):
“On one occasion I chanced to hear the SS doctor urging his assistant: ‘Gib
schon das Fressen den Juden!’ [‘Give the fodder to the Jews!’]”
In the 1948 version, this phrase has a small variation (TVN):
“Gib schon schneller das Fressen den Juden!” (Make haste giving the Jews
their fodder!)
A similar phrase is mentioned by the witness Henryk Tauber. It should be not-
ed, however that according to him the Zyklon-B cans were brought with the
Red-Cross car by Mengele and Rottenführer Scheimetz:254
“I remember that once Mengele urged Scheimetz to feed the victims more
quickly who were in the gas chamber, because then they had to go to Katowi-
ce. Then he told him verbatim: ‘Schmeimetz, gib ihnen das Fressen, sie sollen
253
RGVA, 502-2-54, Inventory, “KGL 30a Kellergeschoss.”
254
Protocol of the interrogation of H. Tauber, May 24, 1945, in front of Investigating Judge Jan
Sehn. Höss Trial, Vol. 11, p. 19 (140).
direkt nach Kattowitz fahren’ (Scheimetz give them the fodder, they must drive
directly to Kattowitz).”
This Scheimetz was also mentioned by the witness Szlama Dragon:255
“The Zyklon was poured into the chambers through the opening by various SS
men, one of whom was called Scheimetz.”
Scheimetz is a fictional character, whose existence is not substantiated by any
document. Piper mentions him in his list of “Fumigators, oderlies and other
SS functionaries,” but with a simple reference to Tauber’s just-quoted phrase
(Piper 2000, p. 241). Aleksander Lasik, in his well-documented article “The
staff of the SS health service in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp
during the years 1940-1945” lists in alphabetical order 184 names, and dedi-
cates an entire page to Josef Mengele (Lasik 1997, p. 314), but he does not
mention Scheimetz at all.
The anecdote was therefore part of the Auschwitz lore, but the imaginary
Scheimetz was known only to such witnesses as remained at Auschwitz when
the Germans withdrew, or returned to it after the Soviets had arrived.
That the sentence under examination was indeed part of the propaganda
baggage of the time256 can also be gleaned from Filip Friedman’s text, who
right after the war was director of the Central Commission of Jewish History
in Poland. In his booklet on Auschwitz, which appeared in 1945, Friedman
wrote:257
“Through the small window [spy hole] an SS doctor observed the room [the
gas chamber]. When he thought that the victims were now heated up enough
for the action of the gas, he shouted to the helper the order: ‘Na! gib ihnen
schon zu fressen!’ (Now, give them to feed on already!) Then the assistant
threw 3 cans of cyklon into each of the hollow wire-mesh columns. The gas
acted fast enough, death mostly occurred already within 3-5 minutes.”
As I mentioned earlier, for Nyiszli the doctor who carried out the gassing was
not Mengele. In his invented deposition at the I.G. Farben Trial, he listed
“four Auschwitz criminals who had not yet been put on trial.” The first was
“an SS captain of the health service” who, together “with a non-commissioned
officer” brought “the gas cans to the crematoria with a luxury Red Cross vehi-
cle”; Mengele was the third. Nyiszli repeatedly reiterated the distinction be-
tween Mengele and the official “gaser”:
“9) […] The green enamelled cans were brought on site with a Red-Cross car
by an SS Hauptsturmführer and an SDG, and thrown by them into the gas
chambers. […]
255
Protocol of the interrogation of Szlama Dragon, Feb. 26, 1945. GARF, 7021-108-12, p. 184.
256
To be clear, I use the term “propaganda” (and the adjective “propagandistic”) in the sense of black
propaganda, what the Germans called “Gräuelpropaganda.”
257
Friedman 1945, p. 69. The underscored phrase is missing in the English translation of the book of
the following year (1946, p. 54).
10) […] At this time a black-painted red-cross car arrived. An SS officer and
an SDG alighted from the car. They held 4 green enameled cans in their
hands.” (NI-11710)
“The selecting physician was an SS Hauptsturmführer named Josef Mengele,
who at that time served as a medical officer at the Auschwitz Concentration
Camp and the 40 sub-camps in the area.” (TVN)
Nyiszli claims that “within moments it [the gas] fills the room crowded with
people”; that the gas “fills the available space very quickly (light gas)”
(TVN); and (NI-11710):
“10 ) […] The granules did not spread out in the gas chamber because they
fell down through perforated pipes, and they immediately released gas due to
contact with the air.”
This requires the instantaneous development of the gas, on the basis of the
false assumption that it forms immediately as a consequence of its contact
with the oxygen of the air. From experiments carried out in 1942 we learn that
only 57% of the hydrogen cyanide soaked in the Erco gypsum pellets evapo-
rated within the first hour at a temperature of 15°C; 96.4% had evaporated af-
ter two hours, and 100% after three (Irmscher 1942, p. 36). At temperatures
above the boiling point (about 26°C), the evaporation of the gas was undoubt-
edly faster, but still not instantaneous.
On the action of the gas, Nyiszli stated:
“Within five minutes it kills them!”
In his contrived deposition he stated (TVN):
“death occurred in a state of unconsciousness due to paralysis of the respira-
tory center, depending on the weather (in rainy, humid weather, there is more
oxygen in the air) in 2-5 minutes.”
As air’s humidity increases, the oxygen’s partial pressure actually decreases.
From experimental data collected by Scott Christianson on executions in hy-
drogen-cyanide gas chambers at prisons in the United States, death of the con-
victs occurred on average after 9 minutes (Christianson 2010, p. 216), with a
hydrogen-cyanide concentration of 3,200 parts per million (about 3.5 g/m³).258
In this case, however, the gas developed immediately, because these U.S. gas
chambers did not use Zyklon B. Hydrogen-cyanide vapors were generated by
the chemical reaction between sodium cyanide and sulfuric acid. Had Zyklon
B been used, execution times would have been considerably longer.
Nyiszli was ignorant of the chemical, physical and toxicological characteris-
tics of Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide), so he invented a totally senseless gassing
scenario:
258
Declaration by F.A. Leuchter during the Second Zündel Trial. Lensky 2010, p. 388.
“The bodies do not lie all over the length and breadth of the room but rather
in a single, story-high heap. The explanation for this is that the fallen gas
granules first permeate the air layer above the concrete floor with their deadly
vapors and only gradually saturate the higher layers of air in the room. This
forces the unfortunate victims to trample each other, to climb over one anoth-
er. In the higher layers the gas thus reaches them later. What a terrible strug-
gle for life must take place there, and yet the time won is only one or two
minutes in all! Could they but think about it, they would know that they are
trampling their parents, their wives, their children in vain, but they cannot!
What they do is a survival reflex! I notice that at the bottom of the tower of
bodies lie the babies, children, women and aged, at the top, the stronger men.”
This description occurs in Nyiszli’s first statement of 1945 and also in his af-
fidavit of October 8, 1947:
“Instead of being spread out evenly on the bunker floor, they were piled up on
top of each other one story high, explained by the fact that the chlorine gas
reached the higher [air] layers with some delay.” (D45).
“10) […] Since the gas granules fell on the floor, the gas developed first in the
lower layers of air and then gradually rose higher. This is how I explain that
after the termination of the gassing the corpses were not scattered out in the
room but were lying in tower-shaped piles. The stronger ones probably threw
the weaker ones down, climbed on those lying below in order to prolong their
life by reaching [air] layers still free of gas. This way women, children, and the
elderly usually ended up lying at the bottom.” (NI-11710)
Nyiszli cooked up this story based on two dreamed-up assumptions. The first
is that the gas used was chlorine, which is 2.45 times as dense as air, meaning
that it is almost two and a half times heavier than air. During a hypothetical
gassing, it would indeed behave according to Nyiszli’s narration: it would first
fill the lower air layers and would gradually fill the room from bottom to top,
like a pool that gradually fills with water. In reality, however, the density of
hydrogen-cyanide gas relative to air is 0.97, so it is insignificantly lighter than
air. In a 1942 disinfestation manual we read (Frickhinger 1942, p. 206):
“Unlike carbon disulfide and other gases that are heavier than air, hydrogen
cyanide is lighter than air, so during the fumigation of a house, it permeates
the entire building to its most remote corner in a very short time,[259] thus
reaching even the most remote hiding places of the vermin.”
Moreover, Nyiszli contradicts his own narrative, because he says that the gas
developed “immediately,” that it filled the room “within moments,” filling
“the available space very quickly (light gas),” and that the gas killed “humans
within a few seconds” (his book, Chapter XIX), which is exactly the opposite
of filling the room gradually, layer by layer.
259
This refers to gaseous hydrogen cyanide.
The second false assumption is that the “gas chamber” was 200 meters
long; Nyiszli never mentions any width, but even a relatively narrow width of
only 5 or 6 meters would have resulted in a surface area of 1,000 to 1,200 m²,
such that 3,000 people could at least move about freely. In reality, however,
Morgue #1 measured only 30 m × 7 m, or 210 m² (from which we have to de-
duct the seven reinforced-concrete support columns with a total of just over 1
m²). It follows that 3,000 victims would have been packed into that room at a
density of 14 people per m², which in itself is impossible, but even if one
could accomplish it somehow, the victims could have barely move even the
fingers of their hands. Not only that, but the victims would have been tightly
pressed against the perforated wire-mesh columns, thus covering to a large
degree the holes in the lower part of the columns. Hence, the evaporating gas
would have mostly dissipated into the room through the columns’ upper holes,
filling it from top to bottom, rather than from bottom to top.
The scenario of the struggle among the victims and that of the tower-
shaped piles of corpses is therefore purely imaginary.
In this context, when describing the corpses, Nyiszli moreover wrote that
their heads were “swollen and blue,” that there was a “Bluish-lilac complex-
ion of the whole body, cyanosis.” (TVN) It is known, however, that “The skin
of hydrogen-cyanide victims often shows a pinkish-reddish discoloration, very
similar to those typical for carbon-monoxide poisonings” (Trunk 2011, p. 40).
A “strong swelling of the head” isn’t an effect of hydrogen cyanide either.
From this it can be deduced that Nyiszli never saw bodies of people gassed
with Zyklon B. Otherwise, he would not have failed to expound a learned
medical disquisition on this phenomenon of reddish skin.
After the gassing, the room was ventilated, about which Nyiszli wrote:
“Twenty minutes later, the electric ventilators are switched on to remove the
gas. The doors open. […]
The modern, exhaustor-system fans quickly clear the room of gas, but it re-
mains present, if in small quantities, trapped in cracks, among the dead. Even
hours later breathing it provokes a suffocating cough.”
But Morgue #1, the alleged “gas chamber,” had only one door. In the 1945
declaration the scenario is different (D45):
“After thirty minutes, the ventilators were switched on, members of the
Sonderkommando on duty opened the door of the gas chamber, and there were
lying 2000 corpses covered in blood (from bleeding noses) and feces.”
Let’s note first that no such thing as an “exhaustor-system fan” exists. Exhaus-
tor is simply synonymous with an air-extraction fan or blower. Morgue #1 of
Crematorium II and III of Birkenau was equipped with an air-intake and an
air-exhaust system (Be- und Entlüftlungsanlage) with one blower each, hence
two altogether, which was evidently unknown to Nyiszli.
Then the corpses were rinsed off:
“The Sonderkommando group stands around the mountain of corpses in tall

rubber boots and flushes it with powerful streams of water.”
This is yet another invented scene based on the assumption that the “gas
chamber” was large enough not only to contain 3,000 corpses, but that these
could then actually be surrounded without difficulty by the Sonderkommando
men. Instead they would have found from the door onward a dense layer of 14
corpses per square meter.
After this, the corpses were dragged away:
“They loop straps around the wrists below the spasmodically clenched fists,
and so drag the bodies of the dead, still slippery with water, to the elevators in
the next room.”
In contrast to this, Nyiszli stated in his 1945 declaration (D45):
“A trained unit dragged the corpses by hooking the curved end of a walking
cane into their mouths.”
Although it is true that the first quote refers to the removal of corpses from the
“gas chamber” while the second refers to the transport of corpses to the fur-
naces, in his book Nyiszli states that the belt system was also used in the fur-
nace room:
“Once again, loops go around the wrists of the dead.”
What demented person would think of dragging a corpse with a walking cane?
Yet this stupidity found other supporters: two self-proclaimed members of the
Sonderkommando. One of them, Dov Paisikovic, spoke about it in 1964 in re-
lation to the alleged “Bunker 5”:260
“[Moll] handed us many walking canes, with the handle bent in an arc, and
showed us how we had to work: he put the bent end of the cane under the neck
of a corpse and dragged it behind him across the ground. Since then we had to
do the job like this.”
In 2007, Shlomo Venezia attributed the walking-cane system to Crematorium
III (Venezia 2007, p. 81):
“In the end, the easiest thing was to use a cane and pull the body from under
the nape. It is schown in a drawing by David Olère. With all the old people
sent to die, we certainly did not have a lack of canes.”
The drawing in question shows the entrance of the alleged gas chamber in the
background, with the door open; an inmate is at work at the entrance, while
another in the foreground drags the body of a woman with his left hand, and
with his right hand a child by its arm toward the furnaces (see Illustration 1).
On the left side of the drawing one can see the edge of the last triple-muffle
furnace. In this drawing, it is evident that the instrument with which the de-
picted inmate drags the woman’s corpse cannot be a walking cane, because
260
Deposition of D. Paisikovic of August 10, 1964. APMO, Zespół Oświadczenia, Vol. 44, p. 88.
the instrument curves in the

inmate’s hand and dangles
down from it. The curved end
of a walking cane, however,
would be lodged around the
woman’s neck, if we believe
Venezia and Paisikovic.
Hence, the tool depicted by
Olère is most likely a belt
tightened around the woman’s
neck.
The Auschwitz Album con-
tains several photographs de- Illustration 1: David Olère‘s artistic license to
picting SS men on the Birke- distort reality: the gas chambers directly an-
nexed to the furnace room (Pressac 1989, p.
nau ramp equipped with a
261 258).
walking stick. Perhaps this
fact inspired the aforementioned rumor.
From the “gas chamber,” the corpses were brought to the furnace room:
“Four large mechanical freight elevators are in operation here. They pile the
dead onto these, twenty, twenty-five to an elevator. An alarm bell informs the
operator that it can ascend! The elevator stops at the cremation hall of the
crematorium, where its massive doors open automatically. The towing Kom-
mando is waiting for it there. Once again, loops go around the wrists of the
dead.”
In reality, Crematoria II and III were equipped with only one elevator each
that ran in a shaft of 2.76 m × 1.43 m.262
In his first statement, Nyiszli affirmed (D45):
“The Sonderkommando washed the corpses with a hose, and the bodies were
then loaded in an elevator and hoisted to the furnace room.”
If he really knew that only one elevator (“lift,” plural “liftek”) existed in
Crematoria II and III, one must assume that he intentionally lied in his
book.263
Here it is pertinent to briefly characterize the elevators of Crematorium II
and III of Birkenau. In Crematorium II, a freight elevator had been installed,
ordered from the “Management of the metal workshop” (WL Schlosserei) on
February 15, 1943. Here is the text of the order:264
261
Freyer et al. 1983, Photos 38 (p. 82), 39 (p. 85), 43 (p. 89), 57 (p. 101), 58f. (p. 102), 60 (p. 103).
262
Auschwitz Construction Office Blueprint No. 933 of January 19, 1942, and Blueprint No. 109/15
of September 24, 1943. Pressac 1989, pp. 280f. and 327.
263
On the issue of the elevators see Mattogno 2015a, Chapter 1.9, pp. 49-54.
264
Höss Trial, Vol. 11, pp. 82f.
“February 15, 1943, PoW camp,[265] Crematorium I [=II], BW 30. Object: 1

flat-plate elevator for min. 300 kg payload incl. installation of respective reel
device, cable and motor as well as guide-rail. Order no. 2563/:146:/ of Janu-
ary 26, 1943 from Central Construction Office. Order taken over from former
detainee metal workshop, terminated March 13, 1943.”
A Polish photograph of 1945 shows that this freight elevator was very rudi-
mentary (Pressac 1989, Photo 20, p. 488). It was installed by the Central Con-
struction Office in Crematorium II.
On February 28, 1943, the Auschwitz Central Construction Office ordered
from the Topf Company two elevator systems (Aufzugmaschinen) complete
with safety gear (Fangvorrichtungen) measuring 2.10 m × 1.35 m × 1.80 m at
a price of 9,371 RM each, hence 18,742 RM total. These were the final devic-
es, which were expected to be delivered within seven months. This was fol-
lowed by a second order:266
“1 patented Demag electric elevator for 750 kg capacity, single cable, to be
raised to 1500 kg capacity by addition of second cable, at 968 RM. This
Demag electric elevator must be supplied at once, as it will have to be used
pending the arrival of the elevators mentioned in item 1.”
This provisional device corresponded to Drawing No. 5037 by the firm Gus-
tav Linse Spezialfabrik f.[ür] Aufzüge (special factory for elevators) of Erfurt,
drawn on January 25, 1943 with the heading “Lasten-Aufzug bis 750 kg
Tragkraft für Zentralbauleitung der Waffen SS, Auschwitz/OS” (Freight eleva-
tor up to 750 kg capacity for the Central Construction Office of the Waffen
SS, Auschwitz/Upper Silesia; Pressac 1993, Doc. 25, unpaginated).
On May 11, 1943, the Central Construction Office asked the Topf Compa-
ny with an urgent telegram for the presence of their chief engineer Prüfer, who
also had to bring along the “installation drawing for provisional freight eleva-
tor Demag for [Crematorium] III” (“Montagezeichnung für prov. Demagau-
fzug III”].267 This device was installed in Crematorium III by Topf’s fitter
Heinrich Messing sometime between May 17 and June 6, 1943 (Pressac 1989,
p. 370).
In an urgent telegram by the Central Construction Office to the Topf Com-
pany dated May 12, 1944, we read:268
“[The] installation of the 2 elevators cannot be done now. Installation will be
done later, together with installation of de-aeration equipment in [Crematoria]
4 and 5.”
However, the final elevators were evidently never installed.
265
Kriegsgefangenenlager: PoW camp; official name of the Birkenau Camp until March 31, 1944,
when it was renamed “Lager II Birkenau.” File memo by Kirschneck of March 31, 1944. AGK,
NTN, 94, p. 60.
266
APMO, BW 30/34, p. 69.
267
APMO, BW 30/34, p. 44.
268
RGVA, 502-1-313, p. 10.
It follows that, in the summer of 1944, Crematorium II was still equipped

with the rudimentary freight elevator with a capacity of merely 300 kg. Its
doors did not open automatically, and it could not transport 20-25 corpses at a
time, but only five, assuming, with Pressac and van Pelt, an average weight of
60 kg per body (Pressac 1989, p. 475; van Pelt 2002, pp. 470, 472).
Hence, from Nyiszli’s perspective, this freight elevator would have had to
do every day (3,000 ÷ 5 =) 600 upward and downward journeys, or 1,200
journeys within 24 hours. With 1,440 minutes in a day, this amounts to just
over a minute per load without any interruption! Or two minutes and 24 sec-
onds for loading, hoisting up, unloading, lowering back down…
3.3.3. The Girl Who Survived the “Gassing”

In Chapter XX of his book, Nyiszli tells the story of a girl found miraculously
alive in the “gas chamber” after a gassing. The Chapter starts as follows:
“In the gas chamber of Crematorium I, 3000 corpses are lying in a heap. The
Sonderkommando men are already picking apart the dead bodies clasped to-
gether in the tower of corpses.”
While extracting the corpses, Sonderkommando men found a girl still alive
and immediately alerted Nyiszli:
“I grab my always-packed doctor’s bag and race with him down to the gas
chamber. Directly next to the wall near the entrance to the enormous room,
half-buried by corpses, a young woman’s body writhes and gives off gasping
noises. The men of the gas Kommando stand around me in agitation. Such a
thing has never happened in their horrible work! We free the still-moving body
from the corpses lying on top of it. I take it in my arms. I carry it, the slight
body of a young girl, into the room next to the gas chamber. Here the gas
Kommando was accustomed to change for their work.”
This place did not exist. The only room “next to the gas chamber” was the
vestibule (Vorraum), where the freight elevator was located.
“I pull out my injection kit and I give the scarcely breathing, unconscious girl
three injections one after another in her arms. […] As a result of the injections
I gave, her pulse is already beating quite noticeably. I wait patiently: the injec-
tions have not yet been completely absorbed, but I already see that in just a
few more minutes she will come around. And so it happens.”
This story must be examined in the light of Nyiszli’s important statement that
Zyklon B was “Chlorine in granular form.” And the symptoms Nyiszli attrib-
utes to the girl are precisely those of chlorine intoxication:
“Something burns her eyes, stifles her throat” (MBV, Chapter XX)
In fact, the “inhalation of chlorine gas” produces these very symptoms accord-
ing to an expert manual (Olson 1999, p. 142):
“One may immediately experience burning of the eyes, nose, and throat, ac-
companied by coughing.”
It follows from this that Nyiszli treated an unconscious girl allegedly intoxi-
cated by hydrogen cyanide with an antidote for chlorine poisoning, and yet,
despite this, the girl recovered!
Keeping in mind that Nyiszli was a physician, what did he inject into the
girl? In his book, he occasionally shows off his knowledge in the medical field
with an annoying conceitedness, creating especially long excursus that have
no relation with his alleged experience at Auschwitz, but here, where it mat-
ters, he limits himself to speaking generically about “injections.”
At that time, the remedies used against hydrogen-cyanide poisoning were
injections of stimulants, such as lobeline and caffeine, and sulfur-containing
substances, such as sodium thiosulfate and sodium tetrathionate (Peters 1933,
p. 74). He evidently knew nothing about this, so he would not have been able
to save the girl.
Nyiszli told Oberscharführer Mussfeld the story of the surviving girl:
“I sketch for him the scenes that this child suffered through in the undressing
room and before the death in the gas chamber. When everything turned to
darkness around her, she too inhaled a bit of the cyklon fumes, but only a bit,
because her frail body, at a push from the crowd in its death throes, fell face
first into a small space on the damp concrete floor. This small bit of humidity
prevented the gas from choking her lungs. You should know that cyklon gas is
not effective in a humid medium!”
The scene is a literary incongruity, because the girl, being merely semi-con-
scious, could not have told Nyiszli that story, so Nyiszli must have read her
mind!
“Clearly a veil of fog still clouds her understanding! In some more-lucid patch
of her young brain she remembers a long line of wagons with which she ar-
rived here.”
When she regained consciousness, she only knew that she was 16, and had ar-
rived with her parents with a transport from Transylvania.
The scene, for Nyiszli, took place in an imaginary room 200 meters long
with a huge surface, enough to allow the victims to fall on the floor. But, as I
explained earlier, its 3,000 victims would have been crammed into a room of
merely 210 square meters, at a density of 14 persons per square meter. How,
then, could the girl have fallen?
The girl’s survival of a gassing lasting 25 minutes must be considered truly
miraculous. For Nyiszli, as we have seen earlier, the death of the victims oc-
curred after at most 5 minutes, after which a mechanical ventilation of another
20 minutes was carried out. The quantity of Zyklon B used for a “gassing” in
Crematoria II and III is said to have been 7 kg for 1,500 people, or so Rudolf
Höss claimed,269 or 4 kg, if we follow Nyiszli, although it was chlorine for

him.
For the sake of the argument, let’s assume the use of 4 kg of hydrogen cy-
anide. With 3,000 victims in the actual room, the available volume of air in it
would have been about 326 m³ (considered an average weight of the victims
of 60 kg and a density of the human body equal to 1 kg/Liter). The theoretical
final concentration of hydrogen cyanide, after all had evaporated from the car-
rier, would have been (4,000 g ÷ 326 m³ =) 12.27 g/m³ or about 9,500 ppm
(parts per million), which is more than 31 times the concentration of 300 ppm
which expert literature describes as “rapidly lethal” (van Pelt 2002, p. 366).270
Leaving aside complicated calculations that would always be hypothetical
to some degree, two fixed points must be assumed. The first is the fact that, in
the execution gas chambers of some U.S. states, death of the executees oc-
curred on average after some 9 minutes with an instantly present hydrogen cy-
anide concentration of 3,200 ppm.
The second is a calculation by Robert Jan van Pelt concerning the average
concentration of hydrogen cyanide absorbed by a hypothetical victim in a gas
chamber with an initial concentration of 10,000 ppm and a mechanical venti-
lation of 8,000 m³/hr of air (this is actually the wrong capacity, the correct one
being 4,800 m³/hr) which corrects the results by decreasing the concentration
of hydrogen cyanide in the inhaled air. Despite this, it turns out that this con-
centration is still some 726 ppm after 15 minutes, more than twice the rapidly
lethal one (van Pelt, ibid.). These 15 minutes refer to the time after the ventila-
tion was switched on, to which we must add the 5 minutes of the actual “gas-
sing.” At the end of these 5 minutes, when ventilation begins, van Pelt calcu-
lates a hydrogen-cyanide concentration of 3,805 ppm, almost thirteen times
greater than the quickly lethal concentration. One could rightly argue that, as I
noted earlier, the evaporation of hydrogen cyanide from Zyklon B was much
slower, meaning that the maximum concentration would have been reached
only after hours (see Mattogno 2015b, p. 108, and Document 25, p. 185), but
this would further invalidate Nyiszli’s story.
The story of the miraculous survival of the girl is also contradictory, be-
cause according to Nyiszli, the bodies were regularly washed down with hoses
after each “gassing,” so the entire floor of the room would have been perma-
nently wet, and all those who would have found themselves on the ground,
with their faces near the wet floor, would have survived if Nyiszli’s moisture
theory were correct, yet Nyiszli describes the girl’s case as unique. Nyiszli al-
so forgot that in his mind the gas was heavier than air and spread from bottom
to top, so that the girl on the floor would have died first.
269
Interrogation of R. Höss, May 14, 1946. NI-036; Affidavit of May 20, 1946. NI-034.
270
As McNamara (1976) has shown, however, the lethal concentrations given in toxicological litera-
ture are based on experiments with rabbits, which cannot be transferred to humans, who have a
significantly higher tolerance. See Rudolf 2017, pp. 228-234.
Finally, Nyiszli’s claim that “cyklon gas is not effective in a humid medi-
um” is not only without any basis, but it actually contradicts what he claimed
elsewhere when positing that the gas developed in contact with the oxygen of
the air, and that “in rainy, humid weather, there is more oxygen in the air”
(TVM), meaning that, if he were right (which he isn’t in any of his claims),
moisture would have increased the effectiveness of Zyklon B.
3.3.4. Dental Gold

“The weight in pure gold of the gold teeth and jewelry ‘extracted’ from the
four crematoria and smelted here each day is 30-35 kilograms” (MBV, Chap-
ter XI)
“every day they smelt 30-40 kilos of gold from the teeth of Jews brought here
and murdered” (MBV, Chapter XIX)
According to a propaganda message by the camp’s resistance movement,
“in the month of May [1944] alone, about 40 kg of gold and white metal were
‘smelted’ exclusively from the teeth extracted from the corpses.”271
By May 28, 1944, 184,049 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz
according to the report compiled the next day by László Ferency, the lieuten-
ant colonel of the Hungarian police in charge of deportations.272 Of these,
about 4,500 were properly registered in Auschwitz, and many more thousands
were sent without registration to the Birkenau “Durchgansglager” (transit
camp).
Hence, from an orthodox point of view, it is impossible to establish how
many of these deportees were actually “gassed.” The only criterion is that of
the claimed percentage of those among the deportees who were fit for labor.
In a report of May 26, 1944, Eberhard von Thadden wrote that, “according
to the observations made so far, about 1/3 of the deported Jews are fit for la-
bor deployment” (“nach den bisherigen Feststellungen sind etwa 1/3 abtrans-
portierten Juden arbeitseinsatzfähig”; NG-2190).
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, in a letter dated June 30, 1944 addressed to SS Bri-
gadeführer Karl Blaschke in reference to the Jews deported to Strasshof, Aus-
tria, confirmed that, “according to experience so far” (“nach den bisherigen
Erfahrungen”), the percentage of those able to work was “estimated to be
about 30%” (schätzungsweise etwa 30%; PS-3803). Therefore, for the sake of
the orthodox argument, we may assume that some 70% of the deportees would
have been gassed. Hence, of the 184,049 deportees mentioned earlier, some
128,800 would have been “gassed” immediately upon arrival. If we believe
the resistance movement’s figure, some 40 kg of dental and jewelry gold was
271
“Sprawozdanie okresowe od 25 V 1944 - 15 VI 1944” (Report for the period of May 25, 1944 to
June 15, 1944). APMO, Au D-RO/91, Vol. VII, p. 446.
272
T-1163, p. 18.
extracted from these deportees, or on average (40 kg ÷ 11 days273 =) 3.6 kg per

day or 33.6 kg for every 100,000 persons.
The quantity mentioned by Nyiszli – some 30 to 40 kg daily – is therefore
ten times greater than that indicated by the Auschwitz resistance movement.
Of course, neither of these claims is backed up with any documentary or mate-
rial evidence, hence they are both completely worthless.
In this regard, the only known facts are based upon form letters filled out
by the “inmates’ dental station Auschwitz CC” (“Häftlingszahnstation des KL
Auschwitz”) in 1942. According to them, 16,325 gold or precious-metal fill-
ings (including the far more common amalgam fillings, which is a mixture of
silver and mercury) were extracted from 2,904 corpses of registered inmates
within 200 days.274 However, neither the weight of the corresponding precious
metals is known nor how many of them were actually made of gold (probably
a minority), nor whether the extant forms of that year are complete or only
partially preserved, nor the percentage of corpses that had gold fillings com-
pared to the total number of deceased inmates of that year, which was 48,447
(47,020 inmates and 1,427 Soviet prisoners of war; Mattogno 2015a, Chapter
15.4.3., pp. 521-526).
The gold obtained in that way, Nyiszli claims, was smelted in Crematorium
III:
“Casting takes place in a disk-shaped graphite form about five centimeters in
diameter. The weight of one gold disk is 140 grams. I know exactly. I weighed
it myself on the dissection-hall scale.” (MBV, Chapter XI)
Considering that the specific weight of gold is about 19.3 g/cm³, a disk of 140
grams with a diameter of 5 centimeters would have a thickness of less than 4
millimeters, in practice a coin.
273
Deportees had been arriving at Auschwitz during 11 consecutive days, considering that the first
transports left on May 14 and arrived at Auschwitz on the 17th.
274
Höss Trial, Vol. 3, p. 86.
3.4. The “Gassings”

3.4.1. The Czech Camp
In his book, Nyiszli mentions seven separate extermination operations in the
“gas chambers” and at the pyres, not including the presumed extermination of
the Hungarian Jews. The first is described as follows:
“The Czech camp was formed from fifteen thousand people brought here from
the Theresienstadt ghetto. It had the character of a family camp, like the Gypsy
camp. They did not undergo selection upon their arrival. Old, young, children,
all in their own clothes, they were able to live a difficult but still tolerable life
together. They performed no work.
Thus they had lived for two years, until the moment of destruction arrived for
them too. K.Z. Auschwitz is an extermination camp! It is only a question of
time when the final hour will strike for its inhabitants.” (MBV, Chapter XIV)
The Birkenau Familienlager, which held Jewish families from the There-
sienstadt ghetto, had a maximum population of around 10,000 at the beginning
of July 1944 (see Mattogno 2016c, pp. 160f.). The first transports, of 2,479
and 2,528 persons respectively, left Theresienstadt on September 6, 1943, and
were registered at the camp two days later (Kárný 1995, Vol. 1, p. 70). There-
fore, on the day of the presumed “liquidation” of the camp – July 10, 1944 –
its inhabitants had been there for around ten months, not two years. Nyiszli
continues:
“The number of inhabitants in the Czech camp on the day of the liquidation
was twelve thousand. Fifteen hundred men and women still capable of work
and eight doctors were selected out from among them; the rest ended up in
Crematoria II and III. The next day, the Czech camp, inhabited for two years,
was deserted. In Crematoria II and III also everything was still. I saw a truck
loaded with ashes pull out from the crematorium and make its way in the di-
rection of the Vistula River.
The camp’s numbers had been reduced by ten thousand heads, and the K.Z.
archives had been increased by one piece of paper.” (MBV, Chapter XIV)
As for the date of the “liquidation,” Nyiszli does not indicate even the month.
According to Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka, to whom Danuta Czech refers as
source for her account, of the 10,000 prisoners in the camp, around 3,580 were
transferred to other camps at the beginning of August, so the number of pre-
sumed victims could only have been around 6,400.275
275
Czech 1997, p. 656; 1989, p. 811. Czech herself fails to include 500 Czech youths mentioned by
Kraus and Kulka, thus reaching the figure 3,080 instead of 3,580. For a discussion of the overall
question, see Mattogno 2016c, pp. 144-167 (Chapter 6.1. “Selection and Alleged Gassing of Jews
from the Family Camp”).
For Nyiszli, on the other hand, 10,000 people were “gassed” on a single
day, with their bodies being cremated in Crematoria III and IV (Nyiszli’s II
and III) in the course of the same day. The next day all that remained of them
was ashes.
This last claim naturally is quite impossible, because the account is based
on Nyiszli’s absurd assumption of a cremation capacity of 5,000 corpses per
day in Crematoria II and III, and his further “error” in assuming that the cre-
mation capacity was the same in Crematoria IV and V. In reality, of course,
the crematoria of the one type (II and III) had fifteen cremation muffles each
and those of the other (IV and V) had only eight. Thus, even if one were to ac-
cept the absurdly inflated number of 5,000 corpses per day for the fifteen muf-
fles of Crematorium III, the eight muffles of Crematorium IV still would not
have had the capacity to bring the total up to 10,000. And that is not even
counting the fact that, as I have explained above, Nyiszli’s own “data” result
in a maximum capacity of only 3,240 corpses per day for a fifteen-muffle
crematorium, not 5,000 (see Section 3.2.3.).
3.4.2. The Jews from Corfu

From the chronological indications provided by Nyiszli in Chapter XIX of his
book, it would appear that the “gassing” of the Jews from Corfu took place in
the last third of September 1944. Immediately after his narration of the pre-
sumed event, which I will quote below, he observes:
“The twelfth Sonderkommando’s life term expires in a couple of weeks any-
way!”
Since, according to Nyiszli, the “expiry date” for the Sonderkommando was to
fall on October 6 or 7, 1944,276 the date for the Corfu action presumably
would have been around September 22 or 23.
With regard to the latter event, Nyiszli writes:
“I have finished my morning rounds visiting patients. In all four of the crema-
toria operations are in full swing. Last night they burned the Greek Jewry of
the Mediterranean island of Corfu, one of the oldest faith communities in Eu-
rope. For twenty-seven days they were hauled along, first on barges, then in
closed freight cars, without food or water. When they arrived at the ramp of
Auschwitz extermination camp and the wagons were opened so that they could
disembark and line up for selection, no one got out! Half of them were dead
and the other half were in a state of unconsciousness, dying. The entire
transport, right to the last man, went to Crematorium II. All night long the
276
In Chapter XXIX, Nyiszli writes “it was the sixth of October, the second-to-last or last day of the
Sonderkommando’s term”; in the event, it turns out to be the last of course, but in the dramatic
context of earlier scenes Nyiszli could not have known that. For more on the dates surrounding the
Sonderkommando’s “term” see Sections 3.6.1f.
plant worked at full capacity. In the morning nothing remained of them but a
great pile of dirty, ragged clothes in the crematorium courtyard. It was a
heart-rending sight as it soaked in the drizzling rain. My glance wanders over
the crematorium chimney: the lightning rods placed at the square chimney’s
four corners, all heavy iron rods, have melted from the terrible fire and are
now bent downwards.” (MBV, Chapter XIX)
In 1946, the Italian historian Gemma Volli wrote an article on the Jews of
Corfu with the following preface (Volli 1946):
“Many of the particulars of what is described in this article were told to me by
Matilde Israel, deported from Corfu and miraculously saved along with two
fellow countrywomen. After having been shut up for three days in the gas
chamber [sic!] while the Germans, at the approach of the Russians, awaited
orders from Berlin, she was taken to Germany. At the end of the war she was
sent to Italy by the Allies.”
According to this eyewitness account, as the rest of the article then relates, the
transport from Corfu contained 2,000 deportees, of whom 150 died during the
journey from Piraeus to Birkenau (which lasted for thirteen days); ultimately,
only 80 women and around 100 men survived the camps.
A single transport reached Auschwitz from Corfu (and Athens) on June 30,
1944, some three months prior to the date which can be deduced from
Nyiszli’s account. According to Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, the
transport numbered 2,044 persons, of whom 446 men and 175 women were
registered in the camp; the remaining 1,423 were “gassed” (1997, p. 654;
1989, p. 809). In a separate study, Czech informs us that the journey from
Greece to Auschwitz lasted about seven to nine days (Czech 1970, p. 17).
Robert Rozett and Shmuel Spector’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust relates
that the Jews of Corfu were arrested on June 9, 1944, and were transferred to
Athens; from there they were then deported to Auschwitz (Rozett/Spector
2013, p. 173). Clearly the twenty-seven day-long journey claimed by Nyiszli
is pure fantasy.
It goes without saying that the cremation of even 1,400 corpses in a single
night in Crematorium II is absurd. On the further absurdity of the melted
lightning rods on the chimney, see Section 3.2.4.
The story of the Corfu Jews appears to attract legendary embellishment,
because in a 1949 article on “The Revolt of the Sondercommando at Ausch-
witz,” Georges Wellers once wrote no less fantastically than Nyiszli (Wellers
1949, p. 17):
“But we know that in March [sic] 1944 the Germans assigned 400 Jews from
Corfu to the Sondercommando [sic], and that the latter collectively refused the
work that was demanded of them. They were immediately exterminated.”
3.4.3. The Gypsy Camp (Zigeuner-Familienlager)

Nyiszli’s description of this episode occurs in Chapter XXV of his book:
“The hour of annihilation arrived for the 4500 inhabitants of the Gypsy camp
as well. The measures taken were the same as for the liquidation of the Czech
camp.”
The prisoners, according to Nyiszli, were all exterminated without exception:
“All through the night the chimneys of Crematoria I and II spewed flame from
themselves. Their glare lit up the entire camp! The bustling Gypsy camp has
become silent and empty. […] The fires had gone out by morning. In each
crematorium courtyard there arose a small, silvery, glistening mound formed
from the victims’ ashes.”
In Nyiszli’s recounting, this “gassing” is subsequent to that of the Jews of
Corfu (last third of September 1944), but other indications are contradictory.
The nearest chronological reference point Nyiszli provides comes in the pre-
vious chapter, where he writes, “I have been in the Sonderkommando for three
months” – but that would place the incident at the beginning of September,
before the presumed extermination of the Jews of Corfu!
The “official” date is August 2, 1944, when 2,897 Gypsies are supposed to
have been “gassed.” The event, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, is entirely
fictitious (Mattogno 2016c, pp. 167-172).
As for Nyiszli’s claim that 4,500 bodies were cremated in a single night in
Crematoria II and III, this number evidently does not derive from eyewitness
observation, but is just another extrapolation from the absurd premise that
each crematorium had a daily capacity of 5,000 bodies. If Crematoria II and
III had a combined capacity of 10,000 bodies per day, then they could have
cremated 4,500 in one night. If…
3.4.4. Camp C (BIIc)

What Nyiszli calls Camp C was more properly Sector BIIc of the Birkenau
Camp, consisting of 32 residential barracks. From contemporary documents it
emerges that, as of June 1944, some 1,000-1,200 Hungarian Jewish women
were housed in each barrack, so the total population of the sector was some-
where around 35,000 persons. Other Jewish women were housed in Sector
BIII (see Mattogno 2007, pp. 12-17).
Nyiszli is rather more generous with his estimates:
“Located next to the Czech camp is Camp C, the camp for Hungarian women;
the number of its inhabitants often reaches 60,000, despite the transports
transferred each day to more-distant camps.” (MBV, Chapter XV)
“The majority of the Hungarians, so I have heard, are in Camp ‘C.’ There
might be 50,000 of them.”277 (MBV, Chapter XXVII)
With regard to the fate of these prisoners, he writes:
“For four months the inhabitants of Camp ‘C’ had lived before the gates of the
crematoria and it took ten days before those going to their deaths had all
passed through them. The souls had departed from forty-five thousand tor-
mented bodies, and over Camp ‘C,’ the temporary home of so many bearers of
tragedy, there now falls an immense silence!” (MBV, Chapter XXVIII)
As for the date of this presumed ten-day event, Nyiszli offers a fairly precise
chronological setting:
“The twelfth Sonderkommando has already used up three and a half months of
its fixed four-month lifespan. The sand is running quickly in the hourglass of
our lives; the time is two weeks now!” (MBV, Chapter XXVIII)
This corresponds to around 22 September 1944. The “liquidation” itself lasts
ten days, until around 2 October. At the beginning of the next chapter, Nyiszli
mentions the date as October 6, so this fictitious dating at least has a certain
internal coherence. The dating also means, however, that this “liquidation”
would have to be contemporaneous with that of the Jews of Corfu (which, as
we have seen earlier, must also be placed in the same week of September on
the basis of Nyiszli’s claims) despite the latter incident appearing much earlier
in the book’s narrative (Chapter XIX).
Irena Strzelecka and Piotr Setkiewicz, in a study of the development of the
Auschwitz Camp, report that, as of June 1944, Sectors BIIc and BIII (“Mexi-
ko”) functioned as Birkenau’s “Transit Camps” (Durchgangslager), where
Jewish men and women, particularly those from Hungary, were housed after
being received into the camp without registration (Strzelecka/Setkiewicz, pp.
98f.). Their presumption that this came about because the SS, on account of
the large number of arriving transports, was unable to perform selections right
away and that the area thus was a “waiting room for the gas” is entirely un-
founded, because, as I shall make clear below, the prisoners in the transit
camp had indeed already undergone selection and were all found fit for labor.
Equally unfounded are the presumed selections for the “gas chambers” alleged
to have been carried out on these prisoners in October 1944. Camp Sector
BIIc was liquidated (i.e., closed) in early November 1944 when the 1,154
Jewish women still housed there were transferred to Sector BI.
The Birkenau transit camp was in reality a “waiting room” for transports of
unregistered prisoners to other camps. On July 14, 1944, the supervisor of the
prisoners’ clothing stores (Häftl. Bekleidungs-Kammern) at Birkenau wrote a
277
Curiously, former inmate Otto Wolken, who provided important documentary material to Polish
judge Jan Sehn at the trial of Rudolf Höss in 1947, affirmed that Sector BIII of Birkenau was oc-
cupied by “50,000 Hungarian girls” (50000 ungarischen Mädchen). AGK, NTN, 88 (Höss Trial,
Vol. 6), Annex 1, “Lager-Bilder,” p. 46.
letter to the clothing department of the camp administration, in which he noted

that, from May 16 to July 14, 1944 some forty-eight transports had departed
Birkenau with altogether 45,132 prisoners.278 The transports originated in the
transit camp, where the prisoners had previously stayed for two to three
weeks. As a result of these transfers, the camp gradually emptied out. As of
October 3, 1944, 17,202 female inmates remained in the transit camp, all of
whom were then formally admitted into the population of the Birkenau wom-
en’s camp.279
According to a list generally attributed to Lejb Langfus, 14,200 female
prisoners from Sector BIIc were “gassed” between October 9 and 21, 1944;280
curiously, Danuta Czech, who cites this document in her account in the Ausch-
witz Chronicle, only finds 11,707 in it. As an examination of the “Strength
Reports” (“Stärkemeldungen”) for the Birkenau women’s camp for the same
period shows, however, recorded changes in the prisoner force of the sector in
no way support these numbers. Even the appearance of prisoners numbered
under the heading “S.B.” (Sonderbehandlung) does not support them: if this
latter term had in fact been a code word for “gassing” (which is not the case),
there still would only have been 858 women gassed in all.281
Turning again to Nyiszli we thus can see that his claim of the extermina-
tion of 45,000 women prisoners from Sector BIIc is a simple historical deliri-
um.
It remains only to ask why, according to Nyiszli, ten days were necessary
for the presumed extermination of 45,000 prisoners. The answer is found in
the following passage:
“Dr. Mengele carried out his decision. The liquidation of Camp ‘C’ began.
Fifty trucks requisitioned for this purpose brought the victims to the cremato-
rium every evening in groups of four thousand. The long line of floodlit trucks
made for a terrible spectacle as they turned in to the crematorium courtyard
with their cargo, frenzied and screaming in terror or paralyzed into silence by
the fear of death. One after another, before the entranceway leading below
ground, they unloaded the already-naked unfortunates, and these were then
driven down into the gas chamber.” (MBV, Chapter XXVIII)
The entire extermination action thus was perpetrated in a single crematorium,
namely, the one in which Nyiszli himself was housed, Crematorium II. As in
the case of the Gypsy camp, the claimed duration of the process is the result of
a simple, nonsensical calculation: since Crematorium II could cremate 5,000
278
AGK, NTN, 88, pp. 111-113. Important parts of the letter in Mattogno 2007, pp. 12-14.
279
APMO, Stärkemeldung [Strength Report], AuII-FKL, D-AuII-3a, p. 53a.
280
The list published in Mattogno 20176c, p. 136, has one transport of 1,000 missing, hence it shows
an erroneous total of only 13,200.
281
See Mattogno 2016c, pp. 135f., for a discussion of Langfus and Czech’s claims in the light of the
Stärkemeldungen, and Chapter 7.5., pp. 187-202, on “‘S.B.’ in the Census Reports of the Wom-
en’s Camp.”
corpses per day according to Nyiszli, the “gassing” and cremation of 45,000
persons would require 45,000 ÷ 5,000 = 9 days, rounded up by Nyiszli to ten.
3.4.5. The Riga Ghetto

The presumed extermination of Jews from the Riga Ghetto is described in
Chapter XXX of Nyiszli’s book:
“[Dr. Mengele] has come from the Jews’ ramp where he stood for hours in the
pouring rain and selected the inhabitants of the Riga ghetto who have been
brought here. But this was no selection, for all went to the left. The two func-
tioning crematoria and the huge ditches of the pyres are filled with them.”
According to Danuta Czech, the sole Jewish transport from Riga to Auschwitz
arrived on November 5, 1943! Of the 1,000 deportees on board, 120 men (reg-
istration numbers 160702-160821) and 30 women (66659-66688) were admit-
ted to the camp, while the remaining 850 were allegedly “gassed” (Czech
1997, p. 519; 1989, p. 645).
For Nyiszli, on the other hand, this presumed gassing took place on Octo-
ber 7 1944! The date is clear from a reference, in the narrative context, to
“yesterday, October 6, 1944” (MBV, Chapter XXX). It follows, thus, that he
was an “eyewitness” to a presumed event which is supposed to have happened
some eleven months previously, before he was even at Birkenau!
Because the extermination action dreamed up by Nyiszli “filled” both of
the still-functioning crematoria and the “huge ditches of the pyres,” the num-
ber of victims presumably would have been around 15,000 (i.e., the capacity,
according to Nyiszli, of the two crematoria plus the pyres).282 Finally, for
Nyiszli, all of the Jews of the Riga ghetto were “gassed,” but if we are to be-
lieve Danuta Czech, 150 of the deportees were registered in the camp accord-
ing to regular procedure.283
3.4.6. The Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto

This “gassing” is described by Nyiszli in Chapter XXXI of his book, with a
short historical introduction:
“The arrival of the Litzmannstadt ghetto has been announced. One should
know about this ghetto that the Germans established it in the winter of 1939.
The number of its inhabitants at the beginning was 500,000 souls. The ghetto’s
inhabitants worked in enormous war factories. In payment for their work they
received ghetto marks, but they could exchange this currency only for extreme-
ly narrowly defined rations. It follows of itself that the disproportion between
282
Cf. “The crematorium works with 15 furnaces. This means the cremation of 5,000 people a day”
(MBV, VII) and “The daily capacity of the two pyres is 5,000-6,000 dead” (MBV, XIII).
283
For further observations on this see Mattogno 2016d, Vol. I, Chapter 4.4., pp. 209-216.
superhuman work performance and nutrition brought about their destruction

en masse. Frequent epidemics also decimated them. In this way, the 500,000
souls melted away to 70,000 by the autumn of 1944.”
A note on the establishment of the Lodz ghetto by the president of the Regier-
ungsbezirk (Administrative District) Kalisch from December 10, 1939 report-
ed that there were some 320,000 Jews in the city at the time (Baranowski
1999, p. 16). The actual order to establish the ghetto was announced on Feb-
ruary 8, 1940, and the ghetto’s enclosure was completed on April 30 (ibid.,
pp. 30, 32). The most basic facts that “one should know about this ghetto” ac-
cording to Nyiszli are therefore wrong. He continues his story as follows:
“Now the end has come for these as well. Each day they arrive at the Jews’
ramp of K.Z. Auschwitz in groups of ten thousand. The selection sent ninety-
five percent to the left, five percent to the right. Cast out, bowed down by the
weight of the tragedy of their accursed race, tortured by the spirit-killing deso-
lation of five years of life in the ghetto, aged by decades by the slave labor im-
posed upon them, they have exhausted their capacity to experience good or
evil. They pass through the crematorium gates with indifference, though it is
no secret to them that they have arrived at the last stage on the journey of their
fate.”
As for the dating of the alleged event, Nyiszli places it after the events of Oc-
tober 6 (when the previous Sonderkommando is supposed to have been liqui-
dated), and relates that it lasted about a week:
“A week had passed, the liquidation of the Litzmannstadt ghetto has ended.
The late October sunshine gives way to cold autumn rain.”
Hence, the extermination action must have occurred in October 1944. Danuta
Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, on the other hand, lists sixteen transports from
the Lodz Ghetto between August 15 and September 18, 1944, out of which
only 3,076 prisoners were registered in the camp (Czech 1997, p. 687-712;
1989, p. 851-882). The total number of deportees is supposed to have been
around 60,000-70,000. In reality, only around 22,500 deportees arrived at
Auschwitz, and it is documentarily confirmed that 11,464 Jewish women not
registered at the camp (who for Danuta Czech thus were all “gassed”) were
transferred from the Birkenau transit camp to the Stutthof Camp between late
August and early September 1944. Of the around 11,000 men involved, some
3,100 were registered normally. No documentary trace remains of the remain-
ing 7,900, but it is known that some forty children between the ages of six
months and fourteen years were included in the transport to Stutthof on Sep-
tember 3, 1944; if these children, textbook examples of labor disability, were
not “gassed,” then it is impossible to believe that the 7,900 adult men in ques-
tion were “gassed” (on this see Mattogno 2004, pp. 17-36).
As for the duration of one week in Nyiszli’s account, this clearly is a pure-
ly fictitious observation based on the total of 70,000 Jews supposedly sent to
Auschwitz in groups of 10,000 per day (70,000 ÷ 10,000 = 7 days). Presuma-

bly this would mean, given Nyiszli’s “calculations” regarding cremation ca-
pacity, that the cremations took place in two of the crematoria (which together
would have had a capacity of 10,000 corpses per day), but Nyiszli is unclear
on this question. At one point, he seems to imply that the extermination took
place entirely in Crematorium II, declaring that victims “pass through the
crematorium gates with indifference” (emphasis added). When relating the
story of the father and son from Lodz later in the chapter, however, he notes in
passing that “Crematorium I [II] is not in operation today,” thus implying that
the Jews must also have been killed and cremated elsewhere, at least for that
day. In any event, whatever the logic behind them, the numbers here are no
more likely to be based on real observation than any of Nyiszli’s other num-
bers about the “gassings,” given, as always, the impossibly high cremation
rates which they would require.
3.4.7. The Theresienstadt Ghetto

The last mass extermination action recounted by Nyiszli appears in Chapter
XXXIII of his book. The exact date of the event is unclear from Nyiszli’s ac-
count, but presumably it must have taken place some time in early November
1944, as the first of November is explicitly mentioned as the date in the previ-
ous chapter, and the “announcement” of the ghetto’s residents’ arrival itself
follows the lull of activities in the crematoria after the end of the Litz-
mannstadt action (in “late October”) in Chapter XXXI:
“After several days of silence, the usual din once again dominates the area of
the crematoria. The motors of the big fans drone, the fires in the furnaces are
revived. The arrival of the Theresienstadt ghetto has been announced.” (MBV,
Chapter XXXIII)
Nyiszli describes the presumed event in the same chapter as follows:
“Twenty thousand vigorous, work-capable men died in the gas chambers and
burned to ashes in the fire of the furnaces. The extermination lasted for two
days. Afterwards, a silence lasting for days lay over the crematoria.
Fourteen days later, long trains arrive one after the other at the Jews’ ramp.
Women and children descend from them. There is no selection; all go to the
left. […]
The destruction of twenty thousand wives hoping to make their husbands’ lot
easier and children pining after their fathers followed in the wake of this
summons formulated with such diabolical cunning.”
If we take the first of November (Chapter XXXII) as point of departure, the
earliest that the extermination action could have begun is the third of the
month (at least two “days of silence” after Nov. 1), ending two days later
some time on the fifth; the second phase then would have begun two weeks
later on November 19 and, given that the number of alleged victims was the
same (20,000), presumably lasted another two days until some time on No-
vember 21.
In his fictitious chronology of events, Nyiszli forgot his own claim that the
order prohibiting any further killings had arrived at Birkenau on November
17, 1944 (Chapter XXXIV; see Section 3.4.9.). It follows, if Nyiszli is to be
believed, that the second wave of deportees from Theresienstadt, 20,000 per-
sons, were “gassed” after all “gassings” had ceased! The same is also true for
the liquidation of the Sonderkommando, which is said to have occurred even
later than that.
In his study on the Auschwitz death toll, Franciszek Piper lists eleven Jew-
ish transports from Theresienstadt which went to the camp between Septem-
ber 28 and October 28, 1944. According to his figures, the total number of de-
portees was 18,402, and the transports departed on September 28 and 29, and
on October 1, 4, 6, 9, 12, 16, 19, 23 and 28. Hence, the transports arrived at
relatively regular intervals, not with 20,000 deportees at once, and there was
no fourteen-day pause in the process (Piper 1993, p. 192). Danuta Czech re-
ports that some 3,400 of these deportees were registered in the camp or sent to
the transit camp (1997, pp. 718-742; 1989, pp. 889-920), so the orthodox
number of those presumably “gassed” was about 15,000 as opposed to Nyisz-
li’s 40,000.
As for the two-day duration of the extermination process claimed by
Nyiszli, this no doubt is tied, as always, to his absurd premise of a cremation
capacity of 5,000 corpses per day for each crematorium. After the alleged re-
volt of the Sonderkommando on October 6, 1944, Nyiszli relates that only two
crematoria remained in operation:
“Crematorium III had burned to ashes and Crematorium IV was put out of
operation as a result of the destruction of its machinery.” (MBV, Chapter
XXIX)
Of course, as mentioned in Section 3.2.6., Nyiszli later claimed that Cremato-
rium IV (V in today’s nomenclature) remained “in operation” after the other
had been shut down, which is why he was transferred there for the rest of his
stay in Auschwitz (MBV, Chapter XXXVI). Hence, either Nyiszli forgot all
about his claim that this building’s machinery had been destroyed, or he imag-
ined the damage had been repaired at some point before his transfer to this
crematorium.
At any rate, while Nyiszli’s characteristic vagueness makes it difficult to
determine what, in his imagination, the combined cremation capacity of the
camp’s crematoria was during the liquidation of the Theresienstadt transports,
the suspiciously round numbers involved point to an obvious inference: if two
“fully functional” crematoria together had a daily cremation capacity of
10,000 corpses, then the cremation of 20,000 would have taken two days. No
doubt his calculation was as simple as that.
As background to the action itself, Nyiszli presents, in Hungarian transla-
tion, two supposed documents relating to the assembly of the transports,
which both have the heading “REICH SS COMMISSARIAT DEPLOYMENT
AND ALLOCATION OF COMPULSORY LABORERS” (MBV, Chapter
XXXIII). This of course presupposes the German term “Reichskommissariat,”
which was an administrative unit in Third Reich Germany governed by a
“Reichskommissar.” The Theresienstadt ghetto, however, was not controlled
by a Reichskommissar but was subordinate to the Zentralstelle für jüdische
Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) in Prague.
The text of the call to assemble, according to Nyiszli, was as follows:
“The Jew X. Y. of the Reichsprotektorat is hereby notified that by order of the
above-named authorities he has been assigned to total labor service. The con-
script is required to present any tools used in the practice of his profession, his
instruments, his winter clothes, bedding and provisions for one week to the
delegates of the above-named authorities prior to start of group departures.
The date of departure will be communicated by posted notices.
Signature.”
No such deportation notice is known from the surviving documents, but a file
memo (Aktenvermerk) of September 23, 1944 on a joint communication of SS
Sturmbannführer Hans Günther, chief of the Zentralstelle für jüdische Aus-
wanderung, SS Hauptsturmführer Ernst Möhs, Eichmann’s liaison officer in
Theresienstadt, and SS Obersturmbannführer Karl Rahm, commandant of the
ghetto, declared (Adler 2005, p. 188):
“As it is necessary to make a larger number of Theresienstadt residents avail-
able for total war deployment, and as the inspections conducted yesterday
have shown that this is not possible in Theresienstadt itself due to lack of
space, 5,000 fully capable workers must be deployed outside [the ghetto] for
this purpose, of whom 2,500 will depart Tuesday morning (Sept. 27), and an-
other 2,500 Wednesday morning (Sept. 28).
Eng. Zucker is tasked with establishing the new labor camp. Only light bag-
gage, above all underwear and bedding, etc., and provisions for 24 hours are
to be taken along. The voyage will go in the direction of Dresden.
This will be a labor deployment similar to Zossen.[284] Participants will be
guaranteed good treatment of families, children and wives left behind. […]
Without exception, only men fit for labor of up to 50 years of age may be de-
ployed; in this, Eng. Zucker will have the right of choice. He shall put together
a staff which will allow him to establish an administration there; furthermore,
technicians, craftsmen of every kind, security personnel (ideally former com-
284
A Kommando of 200 prisoners which was sent to the neighborhood of Berlin on March 2, 1944.
munity police), and an appropriate number of doctors with medical equipment

(bandages, medicines), a pharmacist, etc., are to come along.”
These are evidently not arrangements aiming at extermination: the transports
mentioned are those which, according to Danuta Czech, arrived at Auschwitz
on September 29 and 30.285
A short digression is necessary here. In her Auschwitz Chronicle, Czech
supports only her remarks on the first transport with documents, using the fol-
lowing sources (Czech 1997, pp. 718; 1989, p. 889):
“APMO, D-AuI-3/26, Inventory No. 148855; Docs. of ISD Arolsen, NA-Men,
Series B, p. 2/1980.”
Helena Kubica, on the other hand, informs us that the first reference concerns
a handwritten list containing 125 names of twins selected in 1943 and 1944
from transports arriving from Theresienstadt and other places.286 She notes
further that the document was donated to the Auschwitz Museum on April 13,
1965 by ex-deportee Robert Waitz, and that from July 1944 onward the per-
sons named in the list were housed in Barracks 15 of the men’s hospital camp
(Sector BIIf) of Birkenau.287
Czech’s other source is presumably just the continuation of the “B” series
of Auschwitz registration numbers.288 In fact, the only proof of the arrival of
the transport under discussion is the registration numbers assigned to three
pairs of twins:
– B-10502-10503 to the Hauptmann twins
– B-10504-10505 to the Steiner twins
– B-10506-10507 to the Reichenberger twins
Kubica even provides their names (Zoltan and Jenö Hauptmann, Endre and
Zoltan Steiner, Laslo and Ernst Reichenberg) with their birth dates (between
1928 and 1930), but not their nationality (Kubica 1997, p. 453). In fact, noth-
ing indicates that these twins came from the Theresienstadt Ghetto. On the
contrary, Zoltán, Jenö, Endre and László are all typically Hungarian names,
and what is more important still, none of the named children actually appears
in the official list of deportees to and from Theresienstadt (Kárný 1995).
Given that these six registration numbers are the only indication of the pre-
sumed arrival of 2,499 Jews from Theresienstadt at Auschwitz, these incon-
285
Note, however, that, while the first of these transports on September 29 brought 2,499 deportees
from Theresienstadt, the second on September 30 brought only 1,500. According to Czech’s
source, H.G. Adler, the remaining 1,000 discussed in the file memo were sent with the third
transport. See Adler 2005, p. 191.
286
Since twins would result in an even number, this is either Kubica’s mistake or the transport also
contained an odd number of triplets.
287
Kubica 1997, p. 389. In note 22 of this German version of the article, Kubica gives only the ab-
breviated reference “D-AuI/26,” but the full record (D-AuI. n. inv. 148855) appears in the 1989
Polish version, Note 18, p. 100.
288
The “List of Jewish Transports” ends on September 21, 1944. APMO, Ruch oporu, Vol. XXc, pp.
15-22. D-RO/123.
sistencies mean that one cannot even affirm with certainty that the transport in
question really arrived at Auschwitz.
With regard to the transport of September 30, Czech does not adduce any
documentary sources at all, merely citing a timeline at the back of H. G. Ad-
ler’s book on Theresienstadt, which is itself unsupported by any documentary
references.289 Other transports are “documented” by Czech in a fraudulent
manner by recourse to the “Stärkemeldungen” (strength reports), starting with
that of October 6; here, the presumed arrival of 1,500 Jews from There-
sienstadt is “demonstrated” with the admission of 271 Jewish women into the
transit camp (1997, p., 724; 1989, p. 897). While it is true that the “Stärke-
meldung” of October 6, 1944 registers, among the arrivals (Zugänge), 271
“Durchgangs-Juden,”290 nothing proves that these came from Theresienstadt.
Czech’s method is not only arbitrary but also contradictory, because with
the same criterion one should have attributed the 488 “Durchgangs-Juden”291
of October 3292 to the alleged transport of 1,500 Jews from Theresienstadt she
recorded on that date. Instead, she limits herself to reporting that the young
and healthy prisoners were interned in the transit camp, without specifying the
number, while all the others were allegedly “gassed.”293
The only two transports from Theresienstadt actually documented as such
arrived on October 14 and 30, 1944. Their arrival is traceable from the records
of the quarantine camp, Sector BIIa, where three prisoners were registered
from the first transport (Czech 1997, p. 731; 1989, p. 906), and 216 from the
second.294 Czech attributes this registration to the transport from There-
sienstadt of October 14. Here she also mentions “242 female prisoners […]
sent to the transit camp,” and furnishes in addition this precious piece of in-
formation: Hans Günther Adler, who later wrote the history of Theresienstadt
which she draws upon in her Auschwitz Chronicle, arrived with this transport
in Auschwitz and was sent to the transit camp Sector BIIe, evidently without
registration (1997, p. 731; 1989, pp. 906f.).
It is hard to comprehend how Czech can declare that, apart from 216 men
admitted to the quarantine camp and 132 women registered as arrivals
(Zugänge) in the daily report on labor deployment in the Birkenau women’s
289
Czech 1997, p. 719; 1989, p. 891, referring to Adler 1955, p. 694 (2005, p. 700); cf. also Adler
2005, p. 191.
290
APMO, Stärkemeldung, AuII-FKL, D-AuII-3a, p. 55a.
291
In spite of the masculine, these were Jüdinnen (Jewesses), since this documentation concerns the
Birkenau women’s camp (Frauen-Lager, Kl. Au.II).
292
APMO, Stärkemeldung, AuII-FKL, D-AuII-3a, p. 54a.
293
D. Czech, 1989, p. 894. In the next paragraph we read that these 488 women arrived at Auschwitz
“wahrscheinlich am selben Tag mit Transporten des RSHA” “probably on the same day with
transports of the RSHA” and that they “partially may also have come from the Theresienstadt
Ghetto,” but since the only transport on October 3 came from that ghetto, all of these 488 Jewess-
es must have come from Theresienstadt, not just some.
294
Czech incorrectly writes 217; 1997, p. 742; 1989, p. 920. The relevant source document is APMO,
D-AuII-3/1, p. 8, Quarantine List.
camp from 31 October 1944,295 all “[the] remaining 1,689 people” of the Oc-
tober 30 transport were “killed in the gas chambers” (1997, p., 742; 1989, p.
920). Surely Adler cannot have been that rare of an exception, and one thus
cannot exclude the possibility that at least some part of this group was also
sent to the transit camp in Sector BIIe.
As we can see, Nyiszli is not the only one to spin tales.
3.4.8. The Milo Ghetto

Here we may add, if only to demonstrate just how far Nyiszli’s imagination
can take him, one last presumed “extermination,” which Nyiszli describes as
follows:
“The most likely scenario is that they will blow us up together with the build-
ing in the interest of achieving two goals at once. That would be genuine SS
method, or perhaps we will receive a few phosphorus grenades through the
window. Such are what the people of the Milo Ghetto received immediately af-
ter embarkation in the wagons. The train had not even set off with them and
already they were all dead. They arrived like that at the Auschwitz cremato-
ria.” (MBV, Chapter XXXV)
This “Milo Ghetto,” presumably referring to the Greek island of Milos in the
Aegean Sea, is otherwise completely unknown to Holocaust historiography.296
3.4.9. The End of the “Gassings”

In Chapter XXXIV of his book, Nyiszli recounts learning of the presumed end
of “killing operations” at Auschwitz as follows:
“In the early morning hours of November 17, 1944, an SS NCO opens the
door to my room and confidentially informs me that by order of the Reichsfüh-
rer the killing of people in any fashion within the grounds of the K.Z. has been
strictly prohibited. I could not give credence to this statement; I have already
been witness to so much deception. I even expressed my doubts to the bearer of
the good news, but he insisted and repeatedly stated that such an order had
arrived by radio in the crematorium as well as at the Political SS command.
We will see then! What truth is there to it?! This too, perhaps, is another de-
ception.
295
APMO, Frauen-Lager, KL. AuII. Arbeitseinsatz des F.L. Birkenau den 31. Oktober 1944, p. 368c.
296
Interestingly, Angelika Bihari’s 1992 German translation in Im Jenseits der Menschlichkeit inter-
prets the text here as referring to Milan (“aus dem Mailänder Ghetto”), though this would require
amending the Hungarian text to read “a milánói ghettó” rather than “a milói ghettó.” The word
milói itself is rare but unambiguous: in normal usage it occurs almost exclusively in the specific
proper name “A milói Venus” (“The Venus of Milo”), and thus clearly refers to the Greek island
of Milos (Mílosz in modern Hungarian).
Still in the morning hours, I am convinced of the truth of the news. A train
composed of five wagons came to a halt on the rails between Crematoria I and
II. It brought five hundred exhausted, sick prisoners, with the destination ‘rest
camp,’ before the gates of the crematoria. I am an eyewitness as a committee
of the Political SS welcomes them; the SS escort negotiates with their com-
mander. The result of the negotiation is that the five wagons turned back from
before the gates of death with their cargo and all were accommodated in the
hospital barracks of Camp F. […]
Exulting, I register the truth of the news. No doubt about it, the gates of the
crematorium will never open again before the transports of those sent to die.”
For this imaginary order, for the reality of which there exists no documentary
proof whatsoever, Danuta Czech proposes instead a date of November 2,
1944.297 What is more, according to her account, no transport arrived at Birke-
nau on November 17 (1997, p. 750; 1989, pp. 928f.). Curiously, in the first
German edition of her Auschwitz Chronicle (“Kalendarium”), Czech made no
mention of the alleged November 2 halt in “gassing” actions, but she did write
the following under the date of November 26 (1964, p. 89; cf. 1997, p. 754;
1989, p. 934):
“The Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler orders the destruction of the crema-
toria in CC Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
Here, one might imagine, there must at last be concrete evidence for an order,
but the only primary source which Czech refers to in support of this claim in
later editions of the Auschwitz Chronicle is the infamous statement of SS
Standartenführer Kurt Becher, entered into evidence at the International Mili-
tary Tribunal in April 1946, to the effect that sometime between “the middle
of September and the middle of October 1944” Himmler had, at his prompt-
ing, issued an order prohibiting any further killing of Jews.298 Of course this
might be construed as at least supporting the earlier claim of a halt to “gas-
sings” on November 2, though that would still leave unexplained why an order
which, as Becher claimed, was to be “immediately effective,” took at least two
weeks to be implemented at Auschwitz – or a month or more, if Nyiszli’s date
of November 17 is to be believed.
From all of which one can thus infer just how much certainty there really is
about this presumed “order.”
3.4.10. Transports and Deportees

In Chapter V of his book, Nyiszli affirms that Dr. Mengele
297
“Killing with Zyklon B gas in the gas chambers of Auschwitz [Birkenau] is probably discontin-
ued.” Czech 1997, p. 743; 1989, p. 921.
298
Czech 1997, p. 754; 1989, p. 934. Becher’s statement is reproduced as 3762-PS in IMT XXXIII,
pp. 68-70.
“stands half the day on the Judenrampe, where already four to five trainloads
of deported Hungarians are arriving per day.”
In his correspondence with Paul Rassinier years later, he set the numbers even
higher (see Section 2.3.2):
“These transports consisted of about 5 to 6 trains a day, each of 40 to 50 cars,
brought in from every corner of Europe, specifically to be destroyed here.”
Since Nyiszli claims in Chapter I of his book that his wagon contained 90
people, presumably this would mean that the number of deportees arriving
each day at Auschwitz would have been a minimum of 40 cars × 5 trains × 90
people = 18,000, and a maximum of 50 cars × 6 trains × 90 people = 27,000.
Elsewhere in the same letter to Rassinier, Nyiszli also wrote of the Hungar-
ian transports in particular:
“Finally, we other Hungarian deportees arrived there in May 1944, and by the
end of July already 550,000 Hungarian Jews had perished in the gas cham-
bers.”
While less extreme, perhaps, here too the number is somewhat exaggerated:
by July 9, 1944, some 437,402 Jews had been deported from Hungary (NG-
5615), but since at least 39,000 were verifiably sent to other destinations, no
more than 398,402 could have arrived at Auschwitz (see Mattogno 2007, p.
39).
In any event, five to six trains did not arrive on an average day, nor indeed,
as far as is known, on any day. Nyiszli presumably came up with his numbers
merely to support the vast alleged extermination at Birkenau.
In his false “testimony” at Nuremberg, Nyiszli gave still other numbers re-
garding the alleged death toll during his stay at Auschwitz:
“I was a detainee at the crematoria for eight months. If I consider that about
22,000 people went into the gas chambers every day, if I also consider that the
crematoria were not working every day (repairs, cleaning, etc.), then, all told,
during the period of my imprisonment I was a witness to the death by gas of
about 2 million people.” (TVN)
Nyiszli clearly has forgotten here that in his book he wrote that the total ca-
pacity of the four Birkenau crematoria was 20,000 bodies per day, a limit
which would make it rather difficult to understand how “around 22,000 per-
sons” could have died in the gas chambers “every day.” It’s not like they
could have been burned elsewhere, after all: in his various statements, Nyiszli
consistently shows himself to be ignorant of the story, created by the camp’s
resistance movement (and reprised by Bendel – see Chapter 4.2. – among oth-
ers), according to which at least some portion of those “gassed” in the crema-
toria buildings were subsequently cremated outside in the open air.
Finally, we should note that here, as so often elsewhere, Nyiszli’s math
simply does not add up. If we accept his figures for total cremation capacity
(20,000 or 22,000 bodies per day) and total number of victims (2 million),
then over a course of eight months (ca. 240 days), the crematoria would only
have been active for a minimum of (2,000,000 ÷ 22,000 =) 91 and a maximum
of (2,000,000 ÷ 20,000) 100 days, leaving them inactive for 149 or 140 days.
Strictly speaking, this is not mathematically impossible, of course, but against
it one must consider what Nyiszli said to Rassinier on the subject:
“Very rarely did a crematorium stop for a short period of time when repair or
maintenance work was really indispensable.”
It all adds up, then, but only if “very rarely” and “brief period” mean “more
than half the time.”
3.4.11. Balance Sheet of the Extermination

In Chapter XX, Nyiszli writes that Mengele “considers the sending of hun-
dreds of thousands of Jews to death by gas a patriotic exercise.” in Chapter
XXXII, we read in contrast to that:
“Four million innocent people said farewell to their lives here with a last,
painful glance, that they might then descend into their unmourned tomb.”
In the Epilog to his book, Nyiszli presents a summation of his own experienc-
es as a “witness”:
“My eyes followed two million innocent people to the gas chambers, and I was
witness to the horrors of the pyres.”
This supposed “eyewitness testimony” is blatantly contradicted, however, by
the total number of the gassing victims that he mentions – and this despite the
fact that the numbers he provides for each are themselves rather exaggerated
even from an orthodox Holocaust perspective:
Hungarian Jews: 550,000
Czech camp: 10,500
Jews of Corfu: 1,423 299
Gypsy camp: 4,500
Camp C: 45,000
Riga Ghetto: 15,000 300
Litzmannstadt Ghetto: 66,500
Theresienstadt Ghetto: 40,000
Total: 732,923
To arrive at two million presumed gassing victims “witnessed” by Nyiszli,
one thus would still need some 1,302,000 more! Not only that, but according
to Franciszek Piper’s calculations, from June to November 1944 only around
299
According to Czech 1997, p. 654; 1989, p. 809.
300
Calculated on the basis of the cremation capacity and duration claimed by Nyiszli.
452,500 Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the first place (Piper 1993, “Ta-
ble D,” unpaginated), so even with this “shortfall,” Nyiszli still managed to
“see” with his own eyes a number of gassing victims more than 60% higher
than the total number of arriving deportees.
3.5. Extermination Technology: The Pyres

3.5.1. Location
Apart from the “gas chambers,” Auschwitz possessed another extermination
facility according to Nyiszli: the pyres. He speaks of these at length in Chapter
XIII of his book. This facility consisted of a “thatch-roofed farmhouse” and
two cremation pits, each fifty meters long, six meters wide and three meters
deep, situated
“behind the little birch forest of Birkenau, at a distance of five to six hundred
meters from Crematorium IV in a clearing surrounded by a stand of firs.”
In these pits, the bodies of Jews were burned who were shot on the spot beside
them. While differing in significant details, Nyiszli’s account of this facility
corresponds roughly to what orthodoxy Holocaust historiography calls “Bun-
ker 2” or the “Weisse Haus” (white house).
The first observation to make here is that, although these names allegedly
were in common use among the SS and the prisoners of the Sonderkommando,
Nyiszli shows no knowledge of them and never uses them; indeed, he even
contradicts the second of the two, asserting that the house was “once painted
yellow” (MBV, Chapter XIII).
But there is much more. Where was this “thatch-roofed farmhouse” locat-
ed? Nyiszli, as we have seen, puts it “five to six hundred meters from Crema-
torium IV” (V in today’s nomenclature), but this placement makes little sense.
The house which the orthodoxy rechristened “Bunker 2” was located 200 me-
ters west of the Zentralsauna, outside the camp fence, putting it about 260 me-
ters from the western corner of Crematorium IV and about 300 meters from
that of Crematorium V. In 1944, there was only one access road leading out of
the camp to the west, namely, the extension of the Hauptstrasse, the main
camp road which ran alongside the railway ramp, passing between Crematoria
II and III. About eighty meters past the two entrance gates to the crematoria,
which faced each other mirrorwise, this road exited the camp and merged with
another road which ran along the outside of the Crematorium III compound
and the area of the Kläranlage (sewage-treatment plant), then ran west for
about 300 meters, where a 90° crossroad then led to the area of “Bunker 2.”
There existed a shortcut as well, however, the so-called forest road (Wald-
weg), which appears in a plan of the area west of Construction Sector II from
October 28, 1943 (Bartosik et al. 2014, Doc. 19, p. 99). This was a branch off
the above-mentioned road which began inside the camp some fifty meters
from the last circular sedimentation tank of the sewage-treatment plant. This
road was closed following the construction of the four rectangular sedimenta-
tion tanks at the western extremity of the camp, the area on which these were
located having been originally traversed by the road. This can be clearly seen
from the traces of the road visible in the aerial photograph of Birkenau from
May 31, 1944 (see Documents 15 & 15a).
Naturally, nothing would have prevented one from still going by foot along
this route, though reduced to a path in 1944. That would have permitted a sav-
ings of around a hundred meters.
At all events, those were the only two access routes to the area of “Bunker
2” from Crematoria II and III. Now Nysizli, at the beginning of his account of
his visit to the pyres, explicitly says that he departs from Crematorium II to go
to the “thatch-roofed farmhouse.” The detailed explanation I have provided
above will now allow us to judge Nyiszli’s description of his route:
“On our way we pass alongside the crematorium. We reach open road; as
soon as I show my pass to the SS guard on duty at the wire we pass through
without difficulty. A bright, green, grassy clearing, it seems like a peaceful
landscape, but my searching eye soon picks out the men of the second guard
chain, stretching along about a hundred meters away from us, as they stand or
sit in the tall grass next to their machine guns, accompanied by their enormous
bloodhounds.
Crossing the clearing, we come to the entrance of the little stand of firs [kis
fenyőerdő] that bounds it. Again we arrive before a barbed-wire fence and a
barbed-wire-covered wooden gate. […] Passing through the gate we come to
a courtyard-like area, in the midst of which stands a long, shabbily plastered,
thatch-roofed house. […] Stepping out the door, they do not even have time to
look around them and realize the horror of their situation, for right away the
Sonderkommando seize them by each arm and take them between a gauntlet of
SS guards along a tree-lined, winding path about 150 meters in length to the
pyre, which they only catch sight of at the very end of their journey, as they
emerge from the wooded path.” (MBV, Chapter XIII)
There is nothing in this account which corresponds with the area west of the
Birkenau Zentralsauna in the summer of 1944. Upon exiting the camp, there
was no “grassy clearing,” but rather a grove of trees; the area of “Bunker 2”
itself, on the other hand, could indeed be described as a “clearing” if we are
generous, but there was no “tree-lined, winding path” leading from it.
The “second guard chain” mentioned by Nyiszli was the so-called “grosse
Postenkette” (large guard chain) which, however, in the area west of the
Birkenau Camp, was made up of a series of guard towers placed at intervals of
about 100 meters along the outside of the camp fence beyond the road that ran
around it. Document 16 in the Appendix shows precisely this chain. In Docu-
ment 15a, five guard towers can be discerned, which I have labeled T1-T5.
Document 17 depicts tower T1.
In short, Nyiszli’s description here is completely invented.
3.5.2. Pyres and Aerial Photographs

The pyres, according to Nyiszli, burned continuously day and night:
“We start off in the direction of the thickly billowing, dense, black column of
smoke. Everyone whom misfortune has brought to this place sees this column
of smoke. It is visible from every part of the camp. The terrified gaze of all who
descend from the wagons and line up for selection immediately falls upon it. It
was visible every hour of the day and night. During the day it covered the sky
above the Birkenau woods like a dense cloud; at night it lit up the surround-
ings as if it were the flames of hell.” (MBV, Chapter XIII)
The fact of the matter is that none of the aerial photographs of Birkenau taken
during the presumed mass extermination in 1944 which capture the area of the
presumed “Bunker 2” in whole or in part (May 31, June 26, 26 July 26, Au-
gust 20, 23, 25) shows the least trace of smoke rising from the area. In those
photographs in which a small column of smoke is visible, it rises from the
courtyard of Crematorium V, and the column of smoke does not cover the
whole area of the camp but rather only a tiny part of the courtyard (cf. Mat-
togno 2016b). Document 15/15a in the Appendix is an aerial photograph of
Birkenau taken two days after Nyiszli’s arrival at the camp, May 31, 1944.
None of the six crematorium chimneys is smoking; the area of “Bunker 2”
(the pentagonal area to the west of the little house, marked “B2”) shows no
trace of smoke; the only area that is smoking is located in the north courtyard
of Crematorium V, about twenty meters from the building, and is extremely
small (the smoke is indicated on Document 15a with a letter “R” for Rauch,
German for smoke). By way of comparison, the crematorium was 12.85 me-
ters wide.
3.5.3. The “Farmhouse” (Presumed “Bunker 2”)

No less surprising is the function which Nyiszli attributes to the “thatch-
roofed farmhouse”:
“What was the actual purpose of this house before? As a dwelling? One with
rooms separated from one another by walls, which had been converted into a
single long room for its new purpose by the removal of the partitions? Or was
it indeed built originally as one large room, as a warehouse, or for another
similar purpose? I do not know! Now it is an undressing room: those bound
for death on the pyre take their clothes off here.” (MBV, Chapter XIII)
According to mainstream Holocaust historiography, “Bunker 2” possessed
four “gas chambers” (see e.g. Piper 2000, pp. 136f., 139 for a drawing), but
for Nyiszli there is only “a single long room.” On its function as an “undress-
ing room” I will have more to say below. Nyiszli continues:
“Passing through the gate we come to a courtyard-like area, in the midst of

which stands a long, shabbily plastered, thatch-roofed house. Its little win-
dows are covered over with wooden boards. It is built in the familiar form of a
rural German peasant house. It is at least one hundred and fifty years old.
That much is shown by the ancient, black, thatched roof as well as the many
layers of plaster peeling from the walls.” (MBV, Chapter XIII)
The “little windows” – five of them in all, according to the orthodox version
(ibid., p. 139, plan) – are supposed to have been “bricked over” with only
small openings “covered with wooden flaps” left to serve for introducing
Zyklon B into the building (ibid., pp. 136f.), but for Nyiszli they are simply
“covered over with wooden boards.”
Hence, for Nyiszli, a 9-year-old house becomes 150 years old. His lore
continues as follows:
“Here there are no water taps with which they might at least quench their
burning thirst. There are no deceptive signs to dispel their forebodings. There
is no gas chamber which they believe to be a shower room. Here there is only
a thatch-roofed farmhouse, once painted yellow, with shuttered windows, and
behind it in turn, an enormous column of smoke rising to the sky, diffusing the
scorched smell of burning human flesh and hair.” (MBV, Chapter XIII; em-
phasis mine)
Thus in “Bunker 2” where other “eyewitnesses” saw “gas chambers” in action
during the same period of time,301 Nyiszli saw a simple “undressing room”!
Nyiszli was aware of the term “Bunker,” but for him it designated the half-
buried gas chambers of Crematoria II and III (földalatti bunker “underground
Bunker,” D45). Such a designation was not unheard of; it was used by Henryk
Mandelbaum, another self-proclaimed member of the Sonderkommando, again
at the so-called Auschwitz Garrison Trial:302
“In Crematoria III and IV [= IV and V in today’s nomenclature], the gas
chambers were smaller than those of Crematoria I and II [= II and III]. These
crematoria were of a new kind: they could accommodate a transport of 3,000
persons. This Bunker was some 50 m long and divided into two parts. In this
Bunker, there was a bath with showers and faucets, and a normal person en-
tering it could believe that it was, indeed, a bath, […].”
Furthermore, in an undated “sworn affidavit” (Eidesstattliche Versicherung),
ex-Auschwitz inmate Deszö Schwarz asserted that there were “five cremato-
ria” (“5 Krematorien”) at Birkenau which he described as follows (NO-2310):
“Four of these extermination sites each had a gassing bunker [Gasbunker]
built into the ground, with an average capacity of 1,200-1,500 persons.”
301
They are not, however, in agreement on their number: there were three of them according to D.
Paisikovic, four according to Sz. Dragon, and seven according to the postwar topographical sur-
vey by engineer W. Sakew. See Mattogno 2016a, Docs. 12, 15 and 26, pp. 225, 228 and 238.
302
AGK, NTN, 162, p. 165.
According to Schwarz, the fifth “crematorium” did not have furnaces, but ra-
ther an enormous pit in which the victims were killed with a quick shot and
then thrown into the fire, a conception quite similar to Nyiszli’s.
3.5.4. Killing Technique and Number of Victims

There is much to say as well about the absurd killing technique described,
with an abundance of particulars, by Nyiszli:
“Stepping out the door, they do not even have time to look around them and
realize the horror of their situation, for right away the Sonderkommando seize
them by each arm and take them between a gauntlet of SS guards along a tree-
lined, winding path about 150 meters in length to the pyre, which they only
catch sight of at the very end of their journey, as they emerge from the wooded
path.
The pyre is a ditch 50 meters long, 6 meters wide and 3 meters deep, filled
with hundreds of burning corpses. Along the edge of the pyre facing the wood-
ed path, at a distance of 5-6 meters from each other, SS soldiers stand with
weapons in their hands, 6-millimeter small-caliber weapons used for the shot
to the back of the neck. As they emerge from the wooded path, two Sonder-
kommando men working at the pyre grab the unfortunate victims by the arm
on either side and carry them before one of the SS shooters’ weapons, 15-20
meters away. Amid the horrid screaming, here too the shot sounds out with a
muffled crack. The shot sounds out, and the victim, generally only half dead, is
thrown into the sea of fire in the ditch.” (MBV, Chapter XIII)
A little reflection suffices to show the absurdity of this scenario. Just one para-
graph earlier, Nyiszli has informed the reader that the victims
“go into the undressing room three to four hundred at a time. There, driven
along in a hail of truncheon blows, they quickly lay aside their clothes and exit
by the door on the other side of the house, making room for those following af-
ter them.” (MBV, Chapter XIII)
According to his own count earlier in the chapter, however, there were only
some sixty Sonderkommando men working on the entire site at any one time:
“[…] doing the work are sixty men from Crematorium II, Sonderkommando
men assigned to this place. This is the day duty group. They work from seven
in the morning until seven in the evening, when they are replaced by the sixty
men of the night shift, who are provided by Crematorium IV.” (MBV, Chapter
XIII)
And of course, not all of those sixty men could have been available for the
purpose of accosting the victims as they exited the undressing room, since at
least some of them would have needed to be stationed at the pyres themselves.
Given that, according to Nyiszli, the round trip from the farmhouse to the
pyres was some 300 meters, and that each prisoner was, implicitly, accompa-
nied by a pair of Sonderkommando members,303 it is rather unclear how this

group of “three to four hundred” people, stampeded through the farmhouse “in
a hail of truncheon blows,” could then all be whisked away by a few dozen
Sonderkommando men, working in pairs, before even “[having] time to look
around them and realize the horror of their situation.”
Moreover, there is the problem of the mere distance to be traveled by the
Sonderkommando “escorts.” If, as Nyiszli claims later in the chapter, “[the]
daily capacity of the two pyres is 5,000-6,000 dead,” this would translate to an
average of 5,500 ÷ 2 = 2,750 round trips from the farmhouse to the pyres and
back per twelve-hour shift. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that fifty
Sonderkommando men, working in pairs, were assigned to the first leg of the
route (leaving ten at the pyres themselves), this in turn would translate to
(2,750 ÷ 25 =) 110 round trips, for a total 110 × 300 m = 33,000 m, or 33 km
of walking and/or running. While this is not, naturally, an impossible distance
for a healthy adult to cover in half a day, it swiftly approaches the absurd
when one considers the alleged conditions, such as working outside in sum-
mer heat, over uneven ground, contending – at least some of the time – with
unwilling victims who “try to resist with all the desperate strength of their in-
stinct for self-preservation” (MBV, Chapter XII).
And this still is not counting Nyiszli’s claim that the SS assigned to do the
killing stood “along the edge of the pyre” – a giant pit which, one should re-
member, allegedly was 50 meters long and 6 meters wide and vigorously on
fire. Such a massive pyre would have radiated so much heat that the shooters
would have been burned alive within minutes; indeed, the minimum tempera-
ture of a pyre is at least 600°C (the ignition temperature for the light hydro-
carbons which form from the gasification of the corpses). All this frenetic ac-
tivity would have had to go on for months, day and night, without a moment’s
respite: what lunatic would ever have organized such a mass extermination?
Finally, the extermination activity at the pyres is in total contradiction to all
the other numerical data indicated by Nyiszli.
As we have seen earlier, Nyiszli claimed that the four Birkenau crematoria
had a daily cremation capacity of 20,000 persons while, incomprehensibly, the
number killed in the “gas chambers” each day was 22,000 (see Section
3.4.10.). With regard to the pyres, Nyiszli specifies:
“Those transports which will not fit into the four crematoria are directed here
[to the pyres] from the Jews’ ramp.” (MBV, Chapter XIII)
303
Nyiszli’s original does not explicitly state a number here, but rather says “[a] Sonderkommando
seizes them by/at each arm” (“karon is ragadja őket egy-egy [literally: “one-one”]
Sonderkommandós”), thus implicitly making for two Sonderkommando men per prisoner. Com-
pare the German translation of A. Bihari (“Schon packen zwei Leute des Sonderkommandos sie an
den Armen …” Nyiszli 1992, p. 61) or the English of W. Zbirohowski-Kościa (“… two members
of the Sonderkommando grabbed each prisoner by the arm from either side …,” Frap-Books,
Oświęcim, 2001, p. 65) with the 2000 Polish edition of T. Olszański.
Presumably, this expression refers to transports too large to fit as a group into
the “gas chambers” in the crematoria, and not to cremation capacity as such.
Thus, if the two pyres “processed” 5,000-6,000 victims per day, this number
represents the excess of victims who would not fit into the “gas chambers.”
But even if we take the cremation capacity as the limiting factor, it follows,
then, that every day at Birkenau at least 25,000 people were exterminated,
20,000 in the “gas chambers” and 5,000 at the pyres. Since, as Nyiszli claimed
in his 1945 affidavit (see Section 2.1.), the number of those exterminated rep-
resented 78-80% of all deportees arriving at the camp, the latter must have to-
taled no less than (25,000 ÷ 0.78 =) ca. 32,000,304 but according to the figures
Nyiszli gives in his book (see Section 3.4.10.), a maximum of no more than
27,000 deportees arrived at Auschwitz each day altogether.
Moreover, in calculating the number of presumed victims – two million –
Nyiszli bases his estimate exclusively on the alleged gassing of 22,000 victims
per day in the crematorium buildings, completely forgetting the 5,000-6,000
daily victims of the pyres.
The latter were apparently already in operation upon Nyiszli’s arrival in
Birkenau, and continued functioning until November 16, 1944. The next day,
the elusive order commanding the “end of killings” is supposed to have ar-
rived, and as a result “the crematoria [were] … demolished, the pits for the
pyres filled in” (MBV, Chapter XXXIV). Even if the pyres were in operation
for only ninety-one days – just as the crematoria, if Nyiszli’s own “calcula-
tions” are to make sense (see again Section 3.4.10.) – then a further (91 ×
5,000) = 455,000 to (91 × 6,000) = 546,000 persons would have been exter-
minated there during this period!
And this is a charitable interpretation, for Nyiszli wants to give the impres-
sion of continuous and persistent activity at the pyres, as in these other pas-
sages:
“Three months in the K.Z. have taught them to bewail the past and to fear the
future. The unfortunates all ask me, is it true about the crematorium? What is
the great mass of smoke by day, and what is the great fire by night?” (MBV,
Chapter XXVII)
“The blazing flames of the pyres send their light here.” (MBV, Chapter XXX)
Referring to the fate of the ninth Sonderkommando, Nyiszli declares:
“Four hundred Sonderkommando men met their deaths here by gas. The
corpses were carried by truck to the pyres.” (MBV, Chapter XXIII)
Finally, in Chapter XXI, set in early October 1944, Nyiszli affirms that “so far
11 Sonderkommandos have perished here and taken with them the terrible se-
cret of the crematoria and the pyres.” This must mean that the pyres were al-
304
If we take Nyiszli’s gas-chamber-capacity claim of 22,000 per day, it would result in a total of at
least some 34,600 arrivals daily.
ready in operation – according to Nyiszli’s own fantasy-ridden “calculations”

– by October 1940! (See Section 3.6.1.)
A last observation is in order here. Given that the eleven previous
Sonderkommandos were all eliminated as “bearers of secrets,”305 this would
imply that they were all witnesses of the extermination, which thus must have
begun in 1940. But then, how many tens of millions of victims must have per-
ished at Auschwitz by the end of 1944? Rassinier, who took the trouble to cal-
culate, reached the following conclusion: “41 million corpses, a little more
than 32 million in gas chambers and a little less than 9 million in the open
hearths [i.e., pyres]” (Rassinier 1978, p. 179).
305
Cf. Nyiszli’s use of this expression (“titokhordozó”) in MBV, XXXVI, XXXVIII and XXXIX.
3.6. The Sonderkommando

3.6.1. The Succession of Sonderkommandos
In his book, Nyiszli declares repeatedly that the life of a Sonderkommando
lasted four months:
“They are not permitted to leave the crematorium compound, and every four
months, when they have become familiar with its many secrets, they are liqui-
dated.” (MBV, Chapter VI)
“No one ever entertained the idea that one might save gold here, for every one
of them was a dead man walking with a four-month term!” (Chapter XI)
“After a few more weeks the Sonderkommando’s four-month term will expire.”
(Chapter XXI)
its fixed four-month lifespan.” (Chapter XXVIII)
“In the final hours of the Sonderkommando’s four months it may not be a life-
saving remedy, but it’s a great medicine against the fear of death!” (Chapter
XXIX)
Given that, according to Nyiszli, the twelfth Sonderkommando was liquidated
on October 6, 1944 (see Section 3.6.2.), and that each Sonderkommando oper-
ated for four months, the succession of the twelve Sonderkommandos up to
that date calculates as follows:
First Sonderkommando: 6 October 1940 – 6 February 1941
Second Sonderkommando: 6 February 1941 – 6 June 1941
Third Sonderkommando: 6 June 1941 – 6 October 1941
Fourth Sonderkommando: 6 October 1941 – 6 February 1942
Fifth Sonderkommando: 6 February 1942 – 6 June 1942
Sixth Sonderkommando: 6 June 1942 – 6 October 1942
Seventh Sonderkommando: 6 October 1942 – 6 February 1943
Eighth Sonderkommando: 6 February 1943 – 6 June 1943
Ninth Sonderkommando: 6 June 1943 – 6 October 1943
Tenth Sonderkommando: 6 October 1943 – 6 February 1944
Eleventh Sonderkommando: 6 February 1944 – 6 June 1944
Twelfth Sonderkommando: 6 June 1944 – 6 October 1944
The essential correctness of this succession is confirmed by Nyiszli himself,
who early in his book declares:
“According to the experience of four years, a Sonderkommando lives for four
months” (Chapter X; underlining added)
As such, the first Sonderkommando must have gone all the way back to Octo-
ber 1940.
Needless to say, this account of Nyiszli is thoroughly at odds with the or-
thodox version of “Sonderkommando history” currently in vogue. Franciszek
Piper gives a representative account of the latter (Piper 2000, pp. 180-189),
whose essential details I will summarize here.
The origin of the Sonderkommando itself is somewhat uncertain, since
there exist no documents in this regard.306 Leaving that question aside, the or-
thodox version can be stated roughly as follows:
1) The first Sonderkommando, according to the logic of the orthodox Holo-
caust narrative, should have been established by March 20, 1942 at the lat-
est,307 when – according to the Auschwitz Museum (Czech 1997, p. 146;
1989, p. 186) – “Bunker 1” began operations. According to a handful of testi-
monies, various groups of prisoners were then formed in succession, which
were eliminated from time to time as new groups were formed. Wiesław
Kielar, for example, speaks of a system in which an ad hoc group of twenty
young male prisoners was selected from each transport sent to the Bunker and
tasked with burying the corpses when the gassing was complete (Kielar 1982,
Chapter 27); each such group was then eliminated immediately afterward by
lethal injection. According to Henryk Porębski, on the other hand, such a
group of twenty prisoners was liquidated every two weeks. According to Filip
Müller, a larger group of some eighty prisoners was eliminated in April of
1942.
2) Another Sonderkommando was established toward the end of April or
the beginning of May 1942. By the beginning of July, it contained between
300 and 400 prisoners. The group’s liquidation came during the first ten days
of December 1942, but as Piper himself admits, the testimonies here contra-
dict each other both on the numbers involved and the date of the presumed
killings. Whatever the details, this Sonderkommando would thus have sur-
vived for six months.
3) At the beginning of December 1942, a new Sonderkommando was cre-
ated which by the end of 1943 contained some 400 prisoners. On February 24,
1944, 200 of these prisoners were transferred to the Lublin Camp (Majdanek)
to be killed there. No one has yet explained the reason why it should have
been necessary to carry out these killings at Majdanek, after the many
Sonderkommandos of 1942 who had been exterminated at Auschwitz. The
remaining 200 prisoners are said to have formed the nucleus of the next
Sonderkommando operating during most of 1944; its personnel strength re-
mained unchanged until mid-May when, on the 15th, it was increased by 100
306
In the previously cited publication of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Bartosik et al.
2014), various documents containing the term Sonderkommando are presented to the reader, but
none of these in fact refers to personnel for the “Bunkers” or the crematoria. See Mattogno 2016f.
307
At the latest, because strictly speaking there had to have been some kind of Sonderkommando ac-
tive at the old crematorium in the Main Camp when its morgue is said to have started its operation
as a homicidal gas chamber sometime in late 1941/early 1942. See Mattogno 2016g. But we won’t
complicate matters here unnecessarily.
prisoners, and then by several hundred more soon afterward. When this
Sonderkommando was allegedly eliminated on October 7, 1944, its core
members thus had survived for fully twenty-two months!
The orthodox “reconstruction” of events thus categorically gives the lie to
Nyiszli’s fable of the liquidation of a new Sonderkommando every four
months. Piper himself, in a note to the Polish translation of Nyiszli’s book,
writes explicitly:308
“This was not the case: there was no predetermined schedule for the liquida-
tion of the Sonderkommando.”
Moreover, Piper never suggests that these Sonderkommandos each had a
number.
On the other hand, Danuta Czech affirms that “the so-called Sonderkom-
mando (Special Squad)” was established on July 4, 1942 (1997, p. 192; 1989,
p. 243), and so this group presumably must have been the first. However, in
her entry for December 9 of the same year (following the presumed extermi-
nation of this first Sonderkommando which supposedly occurred on December
3; 1997, pp. 277f.; 1989, p. 349), Czech notes the existence of a “Special
Squad” and a “Special Squad II.”309 The latter presumably would be the new
Sonderkommando established on December 6310 whose core of 200 prisoners
was still present (according, at least, to the orthodox “reconstruction” related
by Piper) in Nyiszli’s Sonderkommando, which thus might have been, on the
most charitable reading, the third, but certainly not the twelfth of its kind.
Nyiszli’s imaginary succession of Sonderkommandos is also intrinsically
self-contradictory. The extermination methods used against them would in
fact have made the transmission of information from one group to the next
impossible:
“According to the experience of four years, a Sonderkommando lives for four
months. Once these have passed, a large detachment of the political SS ap-
pears one day and herds the men of the Sonderkommando into the rear court-
yard of the crematorium. A burst of gunfire, and half an hour later the newly
established Sonderkommando arrives. They strip the clothes from their dead
colleagues, and within another hour all that remains of the latter is a pile of
ashes. Their first job is the cremation of their predecessors.” (MBV, Chapter
X)
Between the new Sonderkommando and the exterminated one there thus could
have been no contact, no continuity, no transmission of information, no shared
experience. Contrary to all logic, during the banquet described in Chapter VI,
308
Nyiszli 1996, p. 174, Note 18. (English translation: Nyiszli 2001, p. 182, note 21.)
309
Czech 1997, p. 282; 1989, p. 355. Curiously, Czech does not use the expression “Special Squad I”
(i.e., “Sonderkommando I”) for the former, although it is indicated in her source. See the discus-
sion in Mattogno 2016f, pp. 95-99, and Docs. 18f. there on pp. 221f.
310
“It is probably called Special Squad II.” Czech 1997, p. 280; 1989, p. 352.
on the day Nyiszli first arrives in Crematorium II, the prisoners who work
there tell him the history of the crematoria, as well as that of the supposed
eleven preceding Sonderkommandos – including, in particular, the “gassing”
of the ninth (see Section 3.6.3.) – none of which they could have possibly
known about.
Nyiszli’s book contains a still more glaring contradiction. On the assump-
tion that he arrived in Birkenau on the day he was registered, May 29, 1944
(see Section 3.1.2.), his assignment to Crematorium II would have occurred
one week later on June 5, because he states on this occasion, with reference to
his family: “It has been a week already since we were separated” (i.e., upon
arrival at the camp; MBV, VI). According to his claimed succession of
Sonderkommandos, however, the twelfth Sonderkommando would have re-
placed the eleventh on the very next day, June 6, 1944. Even allowing for
some slight variation in dates, in the best of cases the liquidation of the elev-
enth Sonderkommando must have occurred a few days previously, at which
time the members of the twelfth would have had to strip and cremate the bod-
ies of their unfortunate predecessors. And yet, in the course of their Pantagru-
elian banquet together, none of the Sonderkommando men bothers to tell
Nyiszli about this bloody event which must have occurred only days before.
Moreover, it is clear that, by the logic of his narrative (assuming there is
one), Nyiszli could not have known that the length of a Sonderkommando’s
life was precisely four months, for such knowledge could only have been ac-
quired by a prisoner of the first Sonderkommando who had survived until the
twelfth, which by definition is excluded under that same logic. Nor does it
make sense to believe that the SS had informed Nyiszli’s Sonderkommando
that they would liquidate it after four months; this too can be confidently ex-
cluded, for the ruse allegedly used by the SS on October 6, 1944 (the “expiry
date” of Nyiszli’s Sonderkommando) in order to liquidate it – namely, transfer
to another camp – presupposes that the SS would not have previously in-
formed the prisoners that they would be exterminated in four months’ time.
3.6.2. The Sonderkommando Revolt

Nyiszli describes this incident in Chapter XXIX of his book. His account con-
tradicts the reconstructions of orthodox historians on numerous points. Fran-
ciszek Piper writes that the revolt broke out on October 7, 1944 (not 6, as
Nyiszli claims). As a result, 451 members of the Sonderkommando were killed
and 212 were left alive (Piper 2000, p. 187). Similarly, Danuta Czech affirms
that on the day of the revolt, again October 7, the Sonderkommando had a
force of 663 men; 250 of these were killed in fighting during the revolt and
another 200 were shot following its suppression (1997, p. 725; 1989, pp. 898-
900). The cause for the revolt in this account also differs significantly from
that described by Nyiszli: according to Czech, the camp resistance movement
“inform[ed] the leader of the Auschwitz Combat Group, who is in the Special
Squad [i.e., Sonderkommando]” that the camp administration was preparing to
liquidate a group of 300 named Sonderkommando members as soon as possi-
ble, and it is for this reason that the Sonderkommando decided to revolt (ibid.;
1989, pp. 898f.). For Nyiszli, by contrast, the entire Sonderkommando knows
exactly the date of its impending “liquidation.”
Remarkably for an event of such significance, until a few years ago, only a
single contemporary document was adduced in support of it, namely,
Standortbefehl (Garrison Order) No. 26/44 of October 12, 1944, which
states:311
“In performance of their duty, the following fell before the enemy, true to their
oath to the Führer, on Saturday, October 7, 1944.”
This is followed by the names of three SS Unterscharführer: Rudolf Erler,
Willi Freese and Josef Purke. It is unknown, however, under what circum-
stances these three non-commissioned officers died (the document itself pro-
vides no further details). Moreover, the three are not otherwise connected with
the crematoria by any document or testimony. And yet, inevitably, the first
victims of any revolt by the Sonderkommando would have to have been the SS
serving at the crematoria, their elimination being the first objective of such a
revolt and the precondition for its success, as Nyiszli himself recounts. (In his
version of events, two SS men at Crematorium II are killed and stuffed into a
furnace.)
Recently, however, a telegram from Auschwitz which alludes to the event,
dated October 8, 1944 and signed “Baer” (SS Sturmbannführer Richard Baer,
then commandant of the Auschwitz Main Camp), has been made publicly
available. The telegram, which was received by the Gestapo detachment at Zi-
chenau/Schröttenburg (Geheime Staatspolizei – Staatspolizeistelle Zichenau/
Schröttenburg), has as its subject “Attempted Mass Escape by Prisoners Em-
ployed in Crematoria Here” and states:312
“On October 7, [19]44 the Kommandos of the crematoria here attempted a
mass escape. Through the swift and decisive intervention of the guard staff
here, however, it was possible to prevent this. The vast majority of these pris-
oners were shot while fleeing. At present the following prisoners are still un-
accounted for:
1) RD. [Reichsdeutsche: ethnic German from Germany proper] VH. [Vor-
beugehäftling: prisoner in protective custody] BV. [Berufsverbrecher: career
311
APMO, D-AuI-1, Garrison Order 26/44; cited by Czech 1997, pp. 726 and 730. The text of the
order is reproduced in N. Frei et al., eds., Standort- und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentra-
tionslagers Auschwitz 1940-1945, K. G. Saur, Munich, 2000, p. 499.
312
The first page of this document was published in 2015 by Igor Bartosik in his short 2015 mono-
graph Bunt Sonderkommando. 7 października 1944 roku (The Sonderkommando Revolt: 7 Octo-
ber 1944), p. 33, without archival reference. The entire document was subsequently made availa-
ble online at: http://auschwitz.ru/en/auschwitz/resistance/sonderkommando/#popup[gallery_2]/0/
(last accessed on Jan. 24, 2018). See Document 18.
criminal] Toepfer, Karl, born Feb. 20, [19]12 in Muehlhausen, admitted April
15, [19]44 […]
2) Russian POW Schenkarenko, Aleksander, born Oct. 10, [19]21 in Witowzy,
admitted April 15, [19]44 …tattooed on chest Nr. 11526.…
3) Soboiko, Moszek, Jew, born Nov. 25, [19]11 in Lomza, admitted Jan. 18,
[19]43 … tattooed on left forearm Nr. 89297.
4) Pliszko, Meier, Jew, born April 16, [19]16 in Wysokie, admitted Jan. 16,
[19]43 … tattooed on left forearm Nr. 88687.”
The telegram then notes further:
“It is assumed that the RD. VH/BV-prisoner Toepfer, who was employed as
Capo [sic] in this Kommando, has been killed and eliminated.”
In light of this document, it is necessary for me to reevaluate the “Escape Re-
port,” dated September 7, 1944, which I reproduced and discussed in a previ-
ous study (Mattogno 2016f, pp. 97-99 & Doc. 19, p. 222):
“Escape report
Around 1400 hours today, a large number of prisoners escaped from the C.C.
Auschwitz II, from the Sonderkommando (crematorium), mostly Jews. Some of
the fugitives have already been shot during the instantly initiated pursuit. The
search operation continues. Features: shaved, no. tattooed on the l.[eft] fore-
arm. Clothing: partly civilian with red stripes. I request to instantly carry out
further search measures a.[nd] to inform subordinate offices. There are only 4
inmates left on the run.”
Despite the date of September 7, 1944, this document undoubtedly refers to
the incident of October 7, as is evident from the flight of prisoners from the
crematoria and the fact that four of these were noted as still at large.
Further confirmation of the event itself is found in another document re-
cently published by Igor Bartosik: a message in Polish from a member of the
Auschwitz resistance movement, dated October 10, 1944, which states:313
“Saturday the 7th, following a battle and the burning of one of the crematoria,
a group of prisoners condemned to gassing, numbering around 700 persons,
made a breach in the guard chain. Around 200 perished during the escape.
Pursuit was hampered by an air raid in the evening. Currently these prisoners
find themselves in the region of Silesia; they may make their way into the
Żywiec, Bielsko and Kraków regions. Please instruct subordinate bodies to
provide all assistance to these prisoners. There is probably a large percentage
of foreigners among them. Caution is necessary due to the searches made by
the German authorities. P.W.O.K.”
313
The document is reproduced in Bartosik 2015, p. 35. The abbreviation P.W.O.K. stands for “Po-
moc Więźniom Obozów Koncentracyjnych” (Help for the Prisoners of Concentration Camps),
name of a clandestine organization dedicated to assisting prisoners in Auschwitz.
Finally, on October 14, 1944, the district delegate for Kraków, Rz. (unknown
abbreviation), sent a telegram, presumably to the Polish government in exile
in London, which stated:314
“The gassing of prisoners at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] was to take place on the
7th October. Desperate Poles attacked their executioners killing six of them.
200 prisoners lost their lives in the fight. 500 of them escaped. The pursuit was
made difficult because of Allied aircraft which were overhead at that time.
Mass executions expected. We demand selection of hostages /to answer for the
lives of our prisoners/”
These recently published documents thus provide a firmer foundation for
judging the historicity of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando revolt, and so for
judging the accuracy of Nyiszli’s account of it as well.
Nothing is known concerning the Kapo Karl Toepfer or the Russian PoW
Aleksander Schenkarenko; they do not appear on the longer list of Sonder-
kommando prisoners recently published, which contains a little less than 390
names (Friedler et al. 2005, pp. 371-391). On the other hand, Moszek Soboiko
appears there as Moshe Sobotka, of Lomza (ibid., p. 385), and Meier Pliszko
is registered as Lemke (Chaim) Pliszko, born 1918 (recte: 1916) in Czerwony
Bor (recte: Wysokie), admitted to Auschwitz January 16, 1943, registration
number 88674 (recte: 88687; ibid., p. 384. Compare details with those in the
Baer telegram above).
Soboiko’s registration number, 89297, was assigned on January 18, 1943
when a pair of transports from the Mechelen (Malines) transit camp in Bel-
gium arrived at Auschwitz, from which 387 men were registered with the
numbers 89076 to 89462.315
The number of victims among the Sonderkommando members has tradi-
tionally been deduced from the surviving “Arbeitseinsatz” (labor deployment)
reports for the men’s camp at Birkenau; according to this source, during the
first ten days of October 1944, there was in fact a reduction in unit strength
from 663 to 212 prisoners, a drop of 451, but the reduced number of 212 first
appears in the report of October 9 (on October 8, unit strength is still noted as
663 persons).316 It is unknown whether the 451 missing prisoners were all
killed, as no documentation in this regard has been found.
314
TNA, FO 371-39454.
315
Czech 1997, pp. 307f.; 1989, p. 386. Curiously, according to Czech another transport arrived on
this same date from the Jewish ghetto in Zambrów, a Polish town some 25 kilometers from
Soboiko’s birthplace of Łomża, from which 130 men were registered with the numbers 89463 to
89592. Naturally this seems a more likely avenue for Soboiko’s arrival at Auschwitz than the Bel-
gian transports. This is supported by the fact that Soboiko is not included on the deportation lists
of Jews from Belgium; see Klarsfeld/Steinberg. But the problem of the (mis-)assigment of his reg-
istration number remains.
316
GARF, 7021-108-20, p. 142. The document is a Soviet summary of the unit strengths of Kom-
mandos 57B-60B (Heizer, “stokers”), extracted from a series of Arbeitseinsatz reports.
In any event, for Nyiszli the revolt broke out one day earlier, on October 6,
1944, at 1:50 pm, to be exact:
“I look at my wristwatch, its hands show half past one. I stand up and call my
companions in for the completion of the autopsy so that at half past two, when
Dr. Mengele arrives, we will be ready. [...] We have been working quietly like
that for about twenty minutes when a huge explosion shakes the air, followed
by a dense clatter of machine pistol fire. I look out the large, green-screened
window and see that the huge, red-tiled roof of Krema III is lying open togeth-
er with its beam structure; an enormous plume of flame and black smoke as-
cends high into the sky.” (MBV, Chapter XXIX)
But could he see all this from where he was? Here it is opportune to report J.-
C. Pressac’s comments (1989, p. 479):
“[Nyiszli] is inventing, not having been able to directly see the start of the fire
because there was a distance of 700 metres between Krematorien II and IV
and he could not see through Krematorium III, a wood, and sewage treatment
station II.[317] What is more, the roof of Krematorium IV was not of RED
TILES, like those of Krematorien II and III, but of BLACK ROOFING FELT,
which explains how it caught fire so easily.”
Hence, it is safe to say that Nyiszli didn’t see any of this from where he was
during that time, but that his entire narrative is based on hearsay or fantasy.
On October 6, according to Nyiszli’s account, the Sonderkommando’s
strength was 860 men, not the actual 663, and of these, twelve succeeded in
escaping but were captured and returned alive to the camp:
“During the breakout they succeeded in getting beyond the Vistula, but they
fell into the hands of a large group of SS. Completely exhausted, they had hid-
den in a Polish house they thought was safe. Their host had notified an SS de-
tachment prowling nearby; the latter fell upon them by surprise and took all
twelve prisoners. […]
The twelve men of ours who were brought back, when they arrived at the
crematorium courtyard with their escort, attacked the latter with their fists in
order to grab their weapons. Thence the injuries to the SS men’s faces. Natu-
rally they immediately shot them all to death, without exception.” (MBV,
Chapter XXIX)
By contrast, Danuta Czech reports that the entire Kommando 57B of Cremato-
rium II escaped, that is, 169 people. The pursuing SS men caught up with
them at Rajsko, and they took refuge in a barn; the SS then set the barn on
fire. No one was brought back to the camp alive.318
317
There were also the three rows of 10 barracks each of the Effektenlager, or Kanada.
318
Czech 1997, pp. 725-726; 1989, p. 899. Worth noting in this context is the fact that this Komman-
do corresponds with the Sonderkommando group Nyiszli must have known best, as his “Cremato-
rium I” is the Crematorium II of post-war historiography.
For Nyiszli, “Eight hundred and fifty-three prisoners had died. Seventy SS
soldiers were killed. Among them were an Obersturmführer, seventeen Ober-
scharführer and Scharführer, and fifty-two Sturmmann, that is, mere privates”
(MBV, Chapter XXIX), whereas the numbers for orthodox history are 451
prisoners and three SS men.
Nyiszli also lists the survivors:
“Today the furnaces are lit only here, and only thirty hastily assembled new
Sonderkommando members are available.
I am standing beside an SS NCO who is recording the numbers from the arms
of the corpses, turned with their faces upward. I do not ask him, he tells me of
his own initiative that twelve men are missing from the Sonderkommando; the
others, with the exception of seven men, are dead. Of the seven men, four are
us, the three doctors of the dissection and hall and the laboratory assistant.
Also still alive are the operator engineer for the dynamos and the fans, a chief
stoker, and a Pipel, that is, an errand boy in the personal service of the SS who
keeps their clothes, boots and cutlery in order and besides this also performs
telephone duty.” (MBV, Chapter XXIX)
I remind the reader here that the official number of survivors is some 212. At
the beginning of the next chapter, Nyiszli again mentions “The thirty new
Sonderkommando men” who presumably constitute the core of the thirteenth
group in succession, but before long this number increases enormously:
“Due to demand, the Sonderkommando stands at four hundred and sixty
men.” (MBV, Chapter XXX)
This number then apparently remains unchanged for more than a month until
the afternoon of November 17, 1944:
“Four hundred and sixty men stand together and wait for death; only the
method of execution still constitutes a matter for conjecture.” (MBV, Chapter
XXXV)
Nyiszli and his three assistants are led away, and the remaining 456 prisoners
meet, in Nyiszli’s telling, a terrible end:
“They took my poor comrades to a nearby forest during the night and did
away with them with flamethrowers.” (MBV, Chapter XXXV)
And here is his final comment on the matter:
“The Sonderkommando, thirteenth in order in the bloody history of the crema-
toria, has been annihilated.” (MBV, Chapter XXXVI)
But for orthodox Holocaust historiography, this thirteenth Sonderkommando
never existed.
That Nyiszli’s story of the Sonderkommando revolt of October 1944 does
not derive from direct experience but rather is a mere literary narration is also
demonstrated by the fact that, in his first deposition in 1945, Nyiszli knows
nothing of any such event. Rather, he refers only to the alleged elimination of
Sonderkommando members (in this version, more than eight hundred of

them!) on November 17 – an event which, for its part, is quite unknown to or-
thodox historiography:319
“On November 17, 1944, cremations at the crematoria were prohibited in the
entire country [sic], and no inmates were murdered anymore after that date.
However, in order to eliminate eyewitnesses to the darkest secrets of the polit-
ical SS, members of the Sonderkommando of Crematoria 1, 2, 3, and 4, count-
ing 846 [inmates], were executed between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. the same day.
The victims included one hundred Hungarian Jews, as well as forty Russian
military officers, and the rest were Jews from France, Holland, Belgium and
Poland.” (D45)
By contrast, in his book published a year later, the Sonderkommando revolt
duly appears, with a suspiciously similar number of victims (853), though it is
still placed on the “wrong” date from the point of view of Holocaust ortho-
doxy (October 6 rather than 7). The elimination of the “thirteenth” Sonder-
kommando in November also appears, as we have just seen, but in the book,
the number of victims has mysteriously dropped by almost one half.
I will return to the question of the Sonderkommando revolt in Subsection
4.2.8.3 when analyzing the statements of “witness” Sigismund Bendel.
3.6.3. The Extermination of the Ninth Sonderkommando

In the context of a nighttime air raid on Birkenau during which the Sonder-
kommando must take shelter in the “gas chamber” (see Chapter 3.9.), Nyiszli
recounts the history of an earlier Sonderkommando, the ninth:
“We also know that the Sonderkommando’s term is drawing to an end and
that such an occasion might come in handy for the SS to slam shut the doors of
the gas chamber and, pouring four canisters of cyklon gas down on us, easily
be done with us. The SS are capable of anything!
It would not be a first! A similar case has occurred before. A part of the ninth
Sonderkommando was taken to the men’s camp of the K.Z., to Barracks num-
ber 13 of Camp ‘D.’ This was an isolated barracks. The Kommando was told
that, on superior orders, their quarters henceforth were not to be in the crema-
toria but rather here in the camp. From here they would go out to the crema-
toria in two groups. That same evening, they were taken to a bath in Camp ‘D’
to bathe and get a change of clothing. After bathing they entered, nude, into
the next room, where they were to put on disinfected clothes. This was a real
disinfecting room, capable of being completely hermetically sealed. Here they
used to disinfect the lousy clothes gathered from the camp. Four hundred
319
The entry for November 17, 1944 in Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle, for example, contains
no mention whatsoever of a mass killing of Sonderkommando members on this date, presumably
reflecting the absence of any support for this claim in the documentary record, as well as the
weight accorded to Nyiszli’s “testimony” in this regard. 1997, p. 750; 1989, p. 929.
Sonderkommando men met their deaths here by gas. The corpses were carried
by truck to the pyres.” (MBV, Chapter XXIII)
The “gassing” in this case thus took place in a real disinfestation gas chamber
in the camp’s Sector BIId, but no facility of this sort existed in this section of
Birkenau. During the period in question (early October 1943 according to
Nyiszli’s fictitious timeline), there was a Zyklon-B gas chamber in the so-
called Entlausungsbaracke II (Delousing Barrack II), Bauwerk 5b in Sector
BIb of the camp, but Holocaust orthodoxy knows of no such incident there ei-
ther. In orthodox historiography, this story presumably corresponds to the al-
leged gassing of the Sonderkommando which was established at the end of
April or the beginning of May 1942, and exterminated in November or De-
cember of the same year.
Franciszek Piper presents a varied collection of contradictory testimonies
in this regard which I summarize in the table below, indicating the witness or
author advancing a given claim, the date and location of the alleged “gassing”
and finally the number of victims “gassed” (Piper 2000, pp. 182f., Note 540):
Witness/Author Date Location Number
November-
Alter Feinsilber Crematorium I 390
December 1942
Arnost Rosin December 1942 Auschwitz I 300
Zdzisław Mikołajski ? Crematorium I 60
D. Czech 3 December 1942 Crematorium I 400
3 December 1942 Crematorium I
D. Czech/J. Bezwińska ?
10 December 1942 Birkenau
Milton Buki 14 December 1942 ? ?
Alfred Wetzler/
17 December 1942 Birkenau 200
Walter Rosenberg
Zalmen Lewental 10 December 1942 ? ?
The reference to “Crematorium I” of course points to the morgue inside the
old crematorium building at the Main Camp which was allegedly used as an
improvised “gas chamber.”
3.6.4. The Crematoria Personnel

Early in his book, Nyiszli affirms that the “SS contingent assigned to the four
crematoria” contained 120 soldiers and that the Sonderkommando itself con-
sisted of 860 prisoners (MBV, Chapter VI). Later, however, he notes that “In
each crematorium the [SS] watch consists of three men” (Chapter XXIX),
which would make for twelve guards in total per shift. While the passage in
question refers to a situation in which there is no cremation activity at the
camp, and thus both Sonderkommando and guard troop strength are reduced
(“On such occasions the SS night shift is smaller as well”), one still struggles
to imagine how 120 guards were needed to guard the crematoria at that rate.
And indeed, according to the (incomplete) series of reports titled “Sum-
mary of the Number and Deployment of Prisoners of Concentration Camp
Auschwitz II” (“Übersicht über Anzahl und Einsatz der Häftlinge des Konzen-
trationslager Auschwitz II”), in late July and August 1944 the guard staff for
the crematoria regularly consisted of three (less commonly two) soldiers each
per shift, with two shifts (day and night) per day. That was the whole of the
SS personnel assigned to service in the crematoria. The working (prisoner)
contingent of the crematoria (“Heizer Krematorium”) in turn was subdivided
into four Kommandos, each also with a day and night shift, called 57-B
(Crematorium II), 58-B (Crematorium III), 59-B (Crematorium IV) and 60-B
(Crematorium V). Each Kommando was made up, with minor variations, of
109 or 110 prisoners per shift.320
Nyiszli knows nothing of any of this at all. Instead, he peddles the myth of
the killing, as “bearers of secrets,” even of the SS men who served in the
crematoria:
“With a few differences they too are Sonderkommandos. From what I know,
after two years on duty they are sent to an SS camp. In this camp the Third
Reich is accustomed to dealing with, that is, liquidating, SS men who are in-
subordinate or who know too much.” (MBV, Chapter XXIV)
He also ventures to furnish verifiable personal data about Oberscharführer
Mussfeld:
“In a petit bourgeois apartment in Mannheim,, it will look even prettier than
here in the attic of the crematorium. Indeed, at the end of the week the sofa is
going to be sent to Mannheim as bulk goods to Oberscharführer Mussfeld’s
home. There it will stand and wait until the Oberscharführer victoriously re-
turns after his hard battles, and relaxes upon it from his exertions.” (Chapter
XXI)
“I offer the Ober some hot rum tea; he drains the glasses with great pleasure.
He sits down at our table and, as if wanting to make up for missed opportuni-
ties, he begins to speak. He speaks of his wife, gone missing during a bombing
raid, of his son, killed on the Russian front.” (Chapter XXXVI)
During his examination on July 9, 1947 before the Polish investigating judge
Jan Sehn, Mussfeld began by giving his personal particulars, declaring that he
was born in 1913 in Neubrück in Brandenburg, was married to Herta Grunow,
with whom he had two sons, then aged 9 and 3 years (in 1947), and that his
family lived in Fürstenwalde. In all his detailed curriculum vitae, he never
320
The Übersicht reports are divided up among multiple archival sources. For references and a sum-
mary table, see Mattogno 2016b, pp. 141-149 (and especially footnote 335 on p. 141) as well as
Document 46, p. 186.
once mentions Mannheim.321 It therefore seems safe to conclude that he did

not live in that city, that his wife did not go missing in a bombing raid and that
neither of his two sons died fighting on the Russian front.
321
AGK, NTN, 144, pp. 50-52. The protocol is signed “Muhsfeldt.”
3.7. Topography and Layout

3.7.1. The Topography of Birkenau
I already noted earlier that Nyiszli’s topographical description concerning the
“farmhouse” (alleged “Bunker 2”) is completely invented, but it is not the on-
ly one. For instance, in Chapter XI of his book, he writes of the “The Jews’
ramp […] split into four branches,” while it is well-known that there were on-
ly three tracks.
Apparently, he did not even have very clear ideas about the position of
Crematorium II compared to Crematorium III:
“The next stop on my patient rounds is Crematorium number II. A meadow
path and the dead-end tracks of the ‘Jews’ ramp’ separate it from Crematori-
um Number I.” (Beginning of Chapter XI)
The entry gates to the courtyards of these two crematoria stood exactly oppo-
site each other at a distance of about 70 meters and were separated from an-
other by the final part of the railway track and by the camp’s main road
(Hauptstrasse).
Nyiszli’s most stunning statement, however, concerns the “Kanada” area of
the camp.” As is well known, this term, in the jargon of the camp, designated
the complex of warehouse barracks in which the personal belongings taken
from the deportees were stored. Birkenau’s warehouse area was called “Kana-
da II” (while “Kanada I” was located near the Auschwitz “Judenrampe” with
three tracks). It consisted of an entire section of the Birkenau Camp, the so-
called “Effektenlager” with 30 barracks arranged in three rows of 10 each to
the south of Crematorium IV, east of the large inmate shower and disinfesta-
tion facility called Zentralsauna, and west of Camp Sector BIIf (see Docu-
ments 19 and 15a).
This “Effektenlager,” therefore, for Nyiszli was a garbage dump, a flaming
hillock of garbage that lay in the courtyard of Crematorium III!
“I had no other arguments. The Ober accepted them, and at my suggestion the
man was sent to the so-called Canada rubbish heap burning in the courtyard
of Crematorium II. One should know of this rubbish heap that they bring here
all the personal effects and spoiled food, as well as identification papers, di-
plomas, documents concerning military honors, passports, marriage certifi-
cates, prayer books, phylacteries, and Torah scrolls which the transports sent
to the gas chambers brought with them from home but which were condemned
to be burned as useless items by the SS’s evaluative criteria.
The Canada rubbish heap was a constantly burning mound; in this place hun-
dreds of thousands of photographs of married couples, elderly parents, attrac-
tive children and beautiful girls burned in the company of thousands of prayer
books. Often I have taken in hand this or that photograph or prayer book. In
almost every single prayer book I found, written in pen, entries with the anni-
versary dates of the deaths of deceased parents. Pressed flowers from all the
Jewish cemeteries of Europe, plucked from the graves of dead beloved rela-
tives and piously preserved. Prayer shawls and phylacteries, of fine and simple
make, lay here in a large heap waiting to be burned.
Here the ‘Dayan’ worked, or rather did not work but merely watched the fire,
but he was dissatisfied even with this when I inquired how he was doing.”
(Chapter XXXV)
Nyiszli apparently had not the slightest idea that Crematoria II and III both
had a waste incinerator (Müllverbrennungsofen).
But there is another extraordinary statement. After the revolt, Nyiszli was
transferred with his three assistants to Crematorium V, where he remained un-
til the evacuation of the camp. Left without surveillance, they left the cremato-
rium to join the camp’s inmates gathered for the evacuation march:
“With a happy feeling of liberation, we start on our way. Direction: K.Z.
Birkenau! It is at a distance of two kilometers from the crematorium.” (Chap-
ter XXXVIII)
Therefore the Birkenau Camp, of which Crematorium V was a part, was at the
same time two kilometers away from it!
3.7.2. Layout of the Crematoria

3.7.2.1. External Appearance
Nyiszli states that in “the most distant part of the crematorium [II] courtyard”
there was “a grove of small fir trees” (Chapter XXII). He mentions it again in
Chapter XXXI (“I sit down in a small grove”) and again in Chapter XXXV
(“The young fir trees of the little grove stand unmoving, covered in white”).
From air photographs of Birkenau in 1944 it appears that a grove did indeed
exist, but it was in the courtyard of Crematorium III (see Document 15). It is
also visible in a photograph of the Auschwitz album, which shows a group of
Jews in front of the fence surrounding Crematorium III south of the entrance
gate (Freyer et al. 1983, Photo 152, p. 176).
According to Nyiszli, there was also a pavement in the courtyard of
Crematorium II, but such a pavement never existed:
“The Sonderkommando lies dead on the bloody pavement stones.” (Chapter
XXIX)
3.7.2.2. Internal Layout

a) The Plan of Crematorium II
Before discussing the rooms of Crematorium II mentioned by Nyiszli, it is
necessary the we familiarize ourselves with that building’s blueprint. To this
end, I refer to Blueprint No. 2197 of the building’s ground floor drawn on
March 19, 1943, which was redrawn and published by Piper with labels added
following claims made by witnesses (see Document 10). The large upper-case
letters were added by me.
On the west side (on the left) there was the laboratory (L: Laboratorium),
adjacent to the south a small washing room (W: Waschraum) with a small toi-
let (W.C.), and adjacent to the east the dissection room (S: Sezierraum), which
opened to the south towards another larger Waschraum, from which one could
enter into a corridor (F: Flur) east of the dissecting room with an adjoining
small vestibule (W.F.: Windfang) leading to the building’s main entrance
door. Not visible in the blueprint reproduced by Piper are two more doors: one
leading from the dissecting room into the corridor, and the other right opposite
of it leading from the corridor into the furnace room (V: Verbrennungsraum;
see Pressac 1989, pp. 276, 280, 283, 303, 305f., 329).
The east side of the building contained the fuel-storage area (B: Brennstoff-
lager), which also contained a staircase leading into the attic, then a narrow
corridor (F: Flur), a small room for the foreman “Capo” (C), another small
room for tools (G: Geräte), a toilet (W.C.), and a staffroom for the inmate
work crew (Aufenthaltsraum für Häftlinge). The latter would have been
Nyiszli’s accommodation (N). The letter M marks the chimney wing with the
waste incinerator (Müllverbrennungsraum).
Piper explains that the laboratory and the dissecting room were the premis-
es where Nyiszli worked. The large washroom (the largest room) was the lo-
cation where, according to Nyiszli, executions were carried out, while H.
Tauber claims that it was used to deposit corpses. Tauber moreover claimed
that the room marked “Capo” was used by the SS guards, while the room
marked “Geräte” was used by the head of the work crew (Kommandoführer;
Piper 2000, p. 150). As far as I know, no blueprint of the attic has survived.
b) Nyiszli’s Non-Existing Rooms
With all that said, let’s examine Nyiszli’s description of that building. I have
already shown that Nyiszli’s description of the basement is pure fantasy both
in terms of the number and the layout of the rooms.
His description of the ground floor is not less conjured-up. Nyiszli invents
the following non-existing rooms:
1) A Carpentry Shop
“The men of the Sonderkommando have painted the room and furnished it
from the chairs and tables and tablecloths left behind by the transports who
have been destroyed here, along with a pinewood bed made in the local
woodworking shop and a wardrobe.” (Chapter VI)
“On the first floor of Crematorium I, separate from the men’s accommoda-
tions, there is a carpentry workshop in which three carpenters perform the
work that crops up in the course of plant operations.” (Chapter XXI)
2) A Barber Shop for the SS

“For haircuts and shaves I may go to the SS barber shop found in the crema-
torium building.” (Chapter VI)
3) A Storeroom
“I may supplement my clothes and linens from the storeroom.” (Chapter VI)
“In the crematorium’s gigantic storeroom there are plenty of clothes, shoes,
stockings!” (Chapter XI)
“He reflects a little, and two tinplate barrels which are lying unused in a
storeroom come to his mind.” (Chapter XXXI)
4) An Office
“I ask for written permission at the office. I obtain a Passierschein valid for
three people.” (Chapter XIII)
5) Lodgings of the SS Guards

“I take a turn first through the SS quarters, I examine anyone who comes for-
ward. There are always a few!” (Chapter X)
“Thus taking by surprise the SS sleeping in their room, we intend to force
them to come with us for as long as we see fit. […] It struck me that I cannot
see anyone from our SS guards. They are probably staying in their room.”
(Chapter XXIX)
6) A Kitchen
“One of them runs to the kitchen to bring hot tea or soup.” (Chapter XX)
“Still on the day of their return I went up to the Sonderkommando’s kitchen,
where Michel the French cook always had some tasty morsel for me. […] Now
too it is with the goal of getting some tasty tidbit to eat that I seek out the good
Michel in his little kitchen.” (Chapter XXIV)
“He is the ascetic of the Sonderkommando, a man who, in order to abide by
the dietary prescriptions of his faith, eats nothing from the bountiful kitchen of
the Sonderkommando but bread, margarine and onions.” (Chapter XXXV)
7) A Toiletry Department
“From the toiletry department I took toothbrushes, fine soaps, nail clippers,
pocket knives, fine-toothed combs, at least ten of everything!” (Chapter
XXVII)
c) Nyiszli’s Own Room

In Chapter VI, Nyiszli gives this information about his room:
“Overlooking the courtyard is a large bright window with heavy iron bars
over it. […] From there, passing through a long, dark corridor, we arrive in
another room. We are in a bright, double-windowed dissection hall of the most
modern type.”
The room Piper points out as Nyiszli’s (marked “N” in Document 10) had two
windows, not one. But the most nonsensical thing is that Nyiszli allegedly
walked to the dissection room by “passing through a long, dark corridor,”
when in fact these two rooms were separated from each other by the furnace
room! To reach the dissection room, Nyiszli would have had to pass the five
triple-muffle furnaces each time. This would have been the case until his
transfer to Crematorium V, hence until November 17, 1944 – according to his
fiction book – hence for five and a half months straight, or 165 days. If that
was so, how could he describe these five furnaces as 15 individual furnaces
each equipped with a separate blower?
In Chapter XXIX, Nyiszli mentions a rather unique path:
“I left the dissection hall and withdrew to my room. I took a large dose of Lu-
minal and smoked one cigarette after another. I did not have the patience to
stay there either, so I went into the cremation hall. […] I went upstairs to the
staff quarters, where the strangeness of the situation immediately became ap-
parent to me. […] I enter the head Kapo’s separate little room; he is sitting at
the table. […] I head back to my room; again I have to go through the furnace
hall.”
It can be argued that the Kapo’s room was not on the ground floor (marked C
in Document 10), but in the attic, which is possible, but it is not possible for
Nyiszli to go back to his room from the attic while passing through the fur-
nace room, because the staircase to the attic started from the very corridor
leading to his room, right next to the dividing wall to the furnace room.
With regard to the attic, Nyiszli outlines a very superficial picture:
“I go with them up to the first [upper] floor of the crematorium, to the quarters
arranged for the personnel there. It is an enormous hall, lined on either side
with comfortable single beds. […] The whole room is flooded with dazzling
light. They do not economize on lighting here like in the barracks of the K.Z.”
(Chapter VI)
For some inexplicable reason he forgot to mention the 10 dormer windows in
the roof and the large gable window at the east side of the building that lit the
room.
d) The Execution Room
Nyiszli narrates the following:
“Moving almost mechanically I put the instruments used in the autopsies back
in their places, wash my hands, pass through into the laboratory and, lighting
a cigarette, sit down to relax a little.
A blood-curdling scream splits my brain. Immediately afterwards I hear a
muffled crack, then the heavy fall of a body. I listen intently, tensely awaiting
the minutes to follow. Another horrible scream, another crack, the heavy fall
of another body, not even a minute later. I count seventy dying screams, seven-
ty cracks, as many falls. Heavy footsteps move away, everything grows still.
The scene where the horrible tragedy has played out is a room next to the dis-
section hall with a separate entrance from the foyer. It is a bare, half-dark
room with a concrete floor. An iron-barred window looks out on the back
courtyard. I use it as a mortuary chamber. I keep the corpses there until it’s
their turn to be autopsied, and I place them there after autopsy too until they
are cremated.” (Chapter IX)
The execution room was therefore adjacent to the dissection hall, separated
from the corridor and vestibule, and had a window on the back yard.
As mentioned earlier, the re-drawn blueprint of Crematorium II published
by Piper is inaccurate, because it does not show any door leading from the
western part of the crematorium into the furnace hall. If we follow Piper’s
plan, the only access to the furnace hall would have been from the freight ele-
vator (Aufzug), which opened on one side to the large washroom and on the
other to the furnace hall. The final blueprint No. 109/16A of Crematorium II
dated October 9, 1943, however, shows a door opposite Furnace No. 1, which
gave access to the corridor from the furnace room, and on the opposite wall of
the corridor another door leading into the dissection room. A third corridor
door led into the large washing room (the alleged execution room), which was
in turn connected to the dissection room by another door (Pressac 1989, p.
329.).
Even though it is true that the large washroom next to the dissecting room
had a separate entrance from the corridor (or foyer, as Nyiszli calls it), Nyiszli
could not possibly have been unaware that the large washroom also had a door
leading straight into the dissecting room. But his claim that this washroom
served as an execution room has a glitch, because when telling the tall tale of
the young woman surviving a “gassing,” Nyiszli wrote:
“A quarter of an hour later they escorted her, or more accurately, took her by
the arm up to the vestibule of the furnace hall where not Mussfeld, but rather
another sent in his place, shot her in the back of the neck.” (Chapter XX)
It is not credible that this girl who, after having survived the “gassing” in the
basement, could not even stand upright by herself, was transported out of the
basement by leading her up the stairs to the court yard, and then back inside
into the vestibule (Flur) through the main entrance. The shortest and most
convenient route would have been by simply using the freight elevator which,
as I have already pointed out, led directly into the large washroom, the alleged
execution room. If that was indeed an execution room, then it is furthermore
mysterious why she was shot in the vestibule.
Although it is true that the large washroom faced the crematorium’s back
yard, it actually had two windows, not just one. These two windows are clear-
ly visible in a photograph of January 1943 depicting the eastern façade of
Crematorium II (Pressac 1989, Photo 7, p. 335), and in the section of the east-
ern façade as published by Piper (Piper 2000, p. 151).
e) The Dissecting Room
Nyiszli wrote that the dissecting room was adjacent to the laboratory, which is
correct, and that it had two windows, which is also correct, but that it had only
one door: “I close the door of the dissection hall, taking the keys with me”
(Chapter VI), when in fact there were two doors (besides the one into the la-
boratory): one opened into the corridor, the other into the large washroom.
f) Crematorium V
As mentioned earlier, Nyiszli was transferred to Crematorium V with his three
assistants on November 17, 1944. In Chapter XXXVIII, he gives a confused
description of this building:
“The distant rumble of heavy artillery makes the windows of my room tremble.
[…]
I hear a door slam, hurried steps move away along the concrete corridor. I
leap out of my bed; I want to know what is happening around me. I rip open
the door of our room; the lights are on in the furnace hall! The doors of the SS
men’s rooms are thrown open, sign of a sudden departure.
The big oak double doors of the crematorium are open as well. […]
We run through the furnace hall; we pass beside the open door of the gold
chamber. Riches worthy of Croesus lie in the crates pillaged by the fleeing SS.
They were only able to carry away a tiny part of the treasures. We are running
for our lives; it does not even enter our heads that we should stop for a mo-
ment and take something with us. We have learned that everything is fleeting
and everything is endowed with only relative value. There is only one excep-
tion to this: freedom!
We pass through the large door; no one bars our way.”
In the blueprint of Birkenau Crematorium IV (and mirror-symmetrically that
of Crematorium V) as published by Piper, there were 4 “gas chambers” in the
west of the building: K1-4 (never mentioned by Nyiszli), while the furnace
room was at the east, and even further east several staff and service rooms (see
Document 20). Piper’s explanations are loosely based on statements by Szla-
ma Dragon dated May 10 and 11, 1945. Nyiszli’s room is not given because
Dragon, like Tauber, did not know Nyiszli and never mentions him. The room
marked by Piper with a B, the alleged kitchen, was the physician’s room
(Arztzimmer) according to the blueprint. However, the crematorium had no

“corridor,” at most a vestibule (Vorraum: A) behind the main entrance (W1).
On the other hand, when Nyiszli ripped open the door of his room, he no-
ticed that the lights were on in the furnace hall (with the 8-muffle furnace P),
and that the doors (plural) of the SS guards’ rooms were open (E2, E3). Since
room F was the fuel storage room, this leaves only room E1 (room of the
Kommandoführer/unit leader).
The phrase “The big oak double door of the crematorium is open as well”
does not make much sense, as there were two double doors at opposite walls
in the furnace room (W4 and W5), and another, the main one, was located at
the center of the building (W1).
During his escape, Nyiszli crossed the furnace room instead of simply
leaving the building through one of the two furnace-room doors W4 and W5.
He then passed “beside the open door of the gold chamber,” which could have
been room D, identified as “dentists” (Zahnärzte) by Dragon, arriving directly
to the “large door,” evidently the main entry door W1. But in order to get
there, he would have had to cross room H (the alleged undressing room, Ausk-
leideraum, which was actually the morgue). This room was almost 20 meters
long and could not possibly have gone unnoticed.
I analyzed these minute details because Nyiszli claimed to have spent eight
months in Crematoria II and V, so he should have known them intimately.
To wrap this up, it is worth pointing out that, if Nyiszli had to cross the
furnace room of Crematorium IV when leaving his room during his two-
months’ stay in that building, he could not have failed to notice that it housed
an 8-muffle cremation furnace in a single brick structure.322 But if that is so,
how could he seriously claim that the four Birkenau crematoria had altogether
60 identical furnaces, each of them 15, and were operating “at the same capac-
ity” (end of Chapter VII of his book)?
322
See Mattogno/Deana, Part 2, Documents 235a & 238-241, pp. 397, 400f.
3.8. Chronology
The chronology of Nyiszli’s book is purely fictitious. Strictly speaking, one
cannot even speak of a chronology, but rather of a mere succession of events,
in which precise dates are extremely rare. First of all, he does not indicate the
date of his arrival at Auschwitz, unlike all the other witnesses. As seen above,
according to his book he entered the Sonderkommando on June 5, 1944, but
the first date mentioned by him is October 6, 1944, and it appears in Chapter
XXIX! Seven other dates follow: November 1, 1944 (Chapter XXXII), No-
vember 17 (Chapter XXXIV), January 1, 1945 (Chapter XXXVII), January 10
(Chapter XXXVIII), January 17 (Chapter XXXVIII), April 7 and May 5
(Chapter XL). He is also very reticent in simply indicating the months, as he
only once mentions “June or July” (Chapter XIX), and once each August
(Chapter XXVII) and September (Chapter XXVIII), never December 1944,
February and March 1945.
In practice, the account about the essential part of his testimony, the four
months of his assignment to Crematorium II until the revolt of the
Sonderkommando, which contains the major part of his description of the
claimed extermination actions, takes place at an undetermined time.
The undefined temporal sequence is divided into three parts:
1. the time since Nyiszli’s arrival at Auschwitz;
2. the time since Nyiszli’s induction into the Sonderkommando;
3. the remaining time until the liquidation of the Sonderkommando.
The sequence of events based on Parts 2 and 3 is called into question by the
fiction according to which Nyiszli, immediately after his arrival at Auschwitz,
was not transferred to Monowitz, but remained in Birkenau. The fact is, how-
ever, that he was initially at Monowitz and was sent back to Birkenau on June
27. Hence, if he was ever assigned to the Sonderkommando to begin with, this
could only have happened at the end of June or at the beginning of July 1944.
His claimed sequence of events therefore contains a time shift (pre-emption of
events) of about a month compared to reality.
Moreover, apart from a fleeting mention of June or July in Chapter XIX, in
his timeline, Nyiszli does not adduce any event before August 1944. Many of
these indications refer to Nyiszli’s meeting with his wife and daughter in
Camp Sector BIId, described in Chapter XXVII (but first mentioned in Chap-
ter XVI):
“It is already three months since we parted from each other on the ramp!”
(Chapter XVI)
“‘I think so, captain, yes, for three months ago when we arrived you selected
them to the right, sir.’ […] Terrible doubts tormented me. Three months is a
long time. An hour here is a long time! […] They have lived for three months
among the most horrible conditions, in continuous fear. […] Three months in
the K.Z. have taught them to bewail the past and to fear the future. […] They
tell me all the bitter experiences of their three-month existence here. […] After
three months in the K.Z. they too know that the ‘Sonder’ is the Kommando of
the walking dead.” (Chapter XXVII)
The meeting therefore took place at the end of August 1944, a month that is
also explicitly mentioned by Nyiszli:
“It is a hot August morning as I set off on the three-kilometer way.” (Chapter
XXVII)
However, Nyiszli also claims that the meeting took place after the “gassing”
of the Gypsies, and in turn after that of the Jews from Corfu, which is said to
have happened during the last third of September, although another indication
of Nyiszli dates the “gassing” of the Gypsies back to early September, that is,
before the presumed extermination of the Jews from Corfu!
After the first meeting, Nyiszli returned to his relatives every day for three
weeks:
“For two weeks I am a daily visitor in Camp ‘C.’” (Chapter XXVII)
Here is the subsequent sequence of events:
“The two days passed and I went to Camp ‘C’ to say goodbye..” (Chapter
XXVII)
“Three days later I visited Camp ‘C’ again.” (Chapter XXVIII)
This results in a total of 26 days. After this, the liquidation of Sector BIIc be-
gan. It follows that there was an interval of at least 26 days between the “gas-
sing” of the Gypsies and that of inmates from Sector BIIc camp, but from
what Nyiszli writes it appears that the two presumed events happened concur-
rently!
I have already noted similar chronological contradictions in the story of the
“gassing” of the Jews transferred from Theresienstadt.
In the fictitious sequence of events invented by Nyiszli, the other few indi-
cations, as mentioned earlier, always concern a duration of three or three and a
half months:
“Three months in the crematorium is a real education!” (Chapter XVI)
“I am an expert and I have been working here for three months now.” (Chap-
ter XIX)
“Three months spent beneath the same roof have developed a state of confi-
dence between us.” (Chapter XX)
“After a few more weeks the Sonderkommando’s four-month term will ex-
pire.” (Chapter XXI)
“I have been in the Sonderkommando for three months.” (Chapter XXIV)
its fixed four-month lifespan.” (Chapter XXVIII)
These indications, in the book’s story, refer to the first week of September (3
months) or to the beginning of the second third of this month, and should be
postponed by about a month based on Nyiszl’si transfer date from Monowitz
to Birkenau.
The most striking fact is that Nyiszli, for the wide privileges he enjoyed,
had every chance of keeping a daily diary; he could even date the events he
describes with great accuracy, because, as he wrote, he had a German news-
paper available every day:
“By the same route every morning the Völkischer Beobachter, the Third
Reich’s official newspaper, arrives at the gate. Again, a railway foreman
brings it. The price of subscription is one piece of gold. Anyone who will bring
a newspaper into the K.Z. for a prisoner for 30 days has earned it.
Ever since I’ve been in the crematorium I have received the paper. I read it
through in a secure hiding place and relate the daily news to the Kommando
clerk. He passes it along to his comrades. Within a few minutes everyone
knows the latest events.” (Chapter XI)
“I encourage them; I urge them to persevere. I describe to them the military
situation, which is developing ever more favorably for us. I read the newspa-
per every day. I have the means to inform them exhaustively.” (Chapter XVI)
Therefore, Nyiszli not only knew the exact date of every single day (also be-
cause he had to sign and date his countless autopsy reports), but he could link
the alleged events of the camp to the war situation in order to remember the
dates more easily. In open contradiction to this, Nyiszli wrote:
“I’ve lived here for four months, if I could calculate with the calendar. But for
a long time I don’t have a sense of time anymore. I do not live ‘in time’ but ‘in
space.’” (TVN, here on p. 152)
On the other hand, Nyiszli’s firm resolution was to save himself in order to
tell the world about the horrors of the crematoria:
“There is no work for me here, and yet I have come down among the dead, be-
cause I feel a sense of duty to my people and to the world, that while I cannot
reasonably hope it, yet through some trick of fate I may escape from here and
write these lines as the only living witness!” (Chapter VII)
This should have been another incentive to date the events exactly. In this re-
gard, Nyiszli adds with a discouraged demeanor:
“If I should ever become free again, whom could I tell of all the things that I
see here, such that they might believe me? Spoken or written words cannot
convey any idea of what is happening here. How futile, then, this effort of mine
to photograph these things in my mind and record them in my memory!”
(Chapter XI)
3.9. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp

Even in this regard Nyiszli recounts various fairy tales:
“At times Auschwitz Concentration Camp has held prisoner as many as
500,000 people within its electrified barbed wire.” (Chapter VI)
The highest camp occupancy ever recorded is undoubtedly that of August 22,
1944, when it barely exceeded 135,000 inmates (Czech 1989, p. 860).
“There’s a new doctor at the K.Z., which, starting from New Year’s day, has
officially ceased to be a K.Z. and become an Arbeitslager, that is, a labor
camp.” (Chapter XXXVIII)
This presumed designation is unknown to holocaust historiography.
Nyiszli wrote about a “four-fold SS guard chain which surrounds the K.Z.”
(Chapter XI), but as mentioned earlier, there were only two guard chains,
which Lasik calls “sentry cordons”: the first an internal “‘small sentry cordon’
(Kleine Postenkette),” the other an external, “‘large sentry cordon’ (grosse
Postenkette)” (Lasik 2000, p. 298).
According to Nyiszli’s lore, it was strictly forbidden for prisoners to read
books:
“But this too is a privilege, the fact that the Sonderkommando can keep books
for themselves and read them. In the K.Z. it’s twenty days in the standing cell
for anyone caught reading, if they don’t just beat you to death.” (Chapter VI)
In contrast to this, the report of the visit to Auschwitz of several German gov-
ernment officials on June 28, 1944 provides this information:323
“Attached to the typing room is a library for inmates which is not very large
that, according to statements by the inmate who manages it, is said to contain
45,000 volumes. Books are exchanged [borrowed and handed back in] every
day.”
I pass over the alleged daily selections of 70 inmates who are said to have
been killed by a shot into the neck in Crematorium II (Chapter IX) and the al-
legedly weekly selection in Camp Sector BIIc (Chapter XXVII), which are not
reflected in Czech’s Kalendarium of Auschwitz. I will return to this in Chap-
ter 5.1.
More interesting in the present context is the matter of air-raid alarms. At
the beginning of Chapter XXIII, Nyiszli tells the following story:
“I am in the habit of doing some reading after going to bed in order to put my-
self to sleep. I do so tonight as usual, but I cannot get much reading done, for
323
Reisebericht. Besichtigung des Konzentrationslager Auschwitz am 28. Juni 1944 durch… (fol-
lowed by the names of seven officials charged with this mission). BAK, R22/1468, Blatt 58a (p. 4
of the report).
the electric light suddenly goes out and soon I hear the K.Z.’s air-raid siren as
well. On such occasions, heavily armed SS guards accompany us down to the
Sonderkommando’s shelter, the gas chamber. So it goes tonight too. We put
our clothes on and set out. […]
Not without cause, then, do we anxiously await the end of the air-raid alert.
The alert was three hours long! We come back up out of the darkness of the
gas chamber! The arc lamps on the barbed wire, the camp’s kilometers-long
chains of light, are lit again. We lie down. I try to sleep. It will be difficult.
The next morning, I am in Crematorium II on my patient-visitation rounds.
The head Kapo of the Sonderkommando there informs me confidentially that in
the darkness of last night’s air-raid alert some partisans approached the
camp. They cut through the wire fence enclosing the crematorium courtyard at
a less conspicuous spot and slipped three machine pistols and ammunition
along with 20 hand grenades through the resulting opening. The Sonderkom-
mando men found them in the early morning hours and brought them to a se-
cure hiding place. […]
Recently there have been air-raid alerts every day, indeed several times a day,
but only a long nighttime blackout can bring us help from our unknown but
devoted comrades. Three or four more nighttime blackouts would be enough
for the partisans to supply us with the necessary quantity of weapons, and then
we could attempt a breakout.”
The chronology is imponderable. In her Kalendarium, Czech mentions one
single Allied mission on Auschwitz and Birkenau, on September 13, 1944
(1989, p. 876):
“For thirteen minutes, from 11:17 am to 11:30 am, the I.G. Farben plants in
Dwory near Auschwitz are bombed.”
On that occasion, two bombs fell on the Birkenau Camp:
“One damages the railway embankment and the railway branch to the crema-
toria, the second destroys a shelter located between the tracks, killing about
30 civilian workers.”
It is known that, from Nyiszli’s alleged assignment to Crematorium II until
October 1944, Allied aircraft passed over the sky of Birkenau on June 26, July
8, 20, 23, August 25 and 13 September. All of these missions occurred during
daylight.
Nyiszli’s story is clearly invented. It is clear that he knew nothing of the
bombing mission with the most serious consequences for the Birkenau Camp
– that of September 13 – because he says nothing about the bombs dropped
near the crematoria, which was quite a significant event. He also claims that
the raids occurred “several times a day,” which is wrong, and that they all oc-
curred at night, which is also wrong. The darkness is a simple literary device
to introduce imaginary incursions of partisans into the Birkenau Camp in or-
der to bring weapons to the Sonderkommando. It’s yet another literary device
for Nyiszli’s fanciful tale of the revolt.
Nyiszli also embellished a story that seems to have a kernel of truth:

“In June or July, it happened that 100,000 postcards were handed out among
the inhabitants of the overcrowded barracks, everyone being required to write
one to an acquaintance. They were given strict orders that they should write as
return address not Auschwitz or Birkenau but rather ‘Am Waldsee’! The only
place with such a name is on the Swiss border! The postcards went out, replies
even arrived for them. I was an eyewitness as they burned the letters sent in
reply, about 50,000 of them, on a bonfire set in the crematorium courtyard. It
would not have been possible to deliver them anyway, for the addressees them-
selves had been burned before the replies to their postcards arrived. Thus was
it all contrived. The goal was to reassure and mislead world public opinion.”
(Chapter XIX)
There is no doubt that postcards sent from Auschwitz with the sender’s ad-
dress given as “am Wannsee” do indeed exist, but it is not obvious why this
happened. Randolph L. Braham writes about it (1981a, Vol. 2, p. 653):
“It was around this time, during the deportations from Zone IV, that postcards
were first brought back from Auschwitz for delivery to the relatives and friends
of many of those deported earlier. Postmarked ‘Waldsee,’ a fictitious geo-
graphic name, the cryptic messages (‘Arrived safely. I am well.’) were often
written by the victims just before they were gassed. The objective of the Ger-
mans was, of course, to lull the Jews still awaiting deportation in Hungary in-
to a false sense of security.”
It is unknown who devised this stratagem. The only certain fact is that on Oc-
tober 25, 1944 Eberhard von Thadden, head Section “Inland II” of the German
Department of Foreign Affairs, asked Adolf Eichmann about a certain
Kemény, an “aryanized Jew” who had been deported, because the Hungarian
embassy wanted him to be sent back. This person was then “in the camp am
Waldsee (?)” (“im Lager am Waldsee (?)”), van Thadden wrote (T/1240); the
question mark meant that von Thadden had no idea what “Waldsee” was. In
his reply, written on November 3, SS Sturmbannführer Rolf Günther, Eich-
mann’s deputy, said that the detainee’s place of residence was unknown to
him (“sein gegenwärtiger Aufenthaltsort hier nicht bekannt ist”; T/1241),
without specifying writing anything about what “Waldsee” meant.
However, there is no connection between “Waldsee” and the alleged gas-
sings, as is shown by one of the first versions of the tale, if not the first. In the
report by Czesław Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, two Jewish inmates who es-
caped from Birkenau on May 27, 1944, which was published in November
1944 by the War Refugee Board, we read (War Refugee Board 1944, p. 30):
“The transport [of Hungarian Jews] was received in AUSCHWITZ and
BIRKENAU according to the well-known procedure (heads shaved, numbers
tattooed, etc.) The men were given numbers beginning with 186,000 and the
women were placed in the women’s camp. About 600 men, of whom some 150
were between the ages of 45 and 60, wore brought to BIRKENAU where they
were divided up among various work detachments. The remainder stayed in
AUSCHWITZ where they worked in the BUNA plant.
The members of the transport were all left alive and none of them, as had been
customary, were sent directly to the crematoria. In the postcards which they
were allowed to write, they had to give ‘Waldsee’ as return address.”
On the other hand, the Kalendarium of Auschwitz states that on May 2, 1944
two transports arrived from Hungary containing 1,800 and 2,000 Jews fit for
labor. Nevertheless, after the initial selection, only 486 men (reg. nos. 186645-
187130) and 616 women were registered. The remaining 2,698 deportees were
allegedly killed in the “gas chambers” (Czech 1989, p. 764). A telegram of
Edmund Veesenmayer, Germany’s plenipotentiary for Hungary, to the Ger-
man Depatment of Foreign Affairs dated April 29, 1944, announced precisely
(Braham 1963, p. 363):
“Today, the first transport of 1800 labor Jews between the ages of 16 and 50
has left Budapest. Tomorrow, another train leaves from Topolya with 2,000
labor Jews.”
It is incomprehensible why 71% of these 3,800 inmates who were all fit for
labor and were sent to Auschwitz precisely in order to work for the geater war
effort, should have been “gassed” on arrival. Czech makes no reference to
“Waldsee” in this context, but other authors are much more zealous in this re-
gard, such as Andzrej Pankowicz. According to him, two transports with Jews
were deported to Auschwitz on April 27 and 28, 1944 from the Kistarcsa
Transit Camp in Hungary with 4,000 people. He writes (1990, p. 260):
“They were forced to write their families postcards with the sender’s address
Waldsee, then in all probability they were all killed in the gas chambers.”
This is the exact opposite of what Walter Rosenberg wrote.
If we apply a logic of deception here, making deportees who were con-
demned to be “gassed” write postcards would have made little sense. Since, as
I observed earlier, at least 107,200 Hungarian Jews were registered or sent to
the Birkenau Transit Camp (Durchgangslager), that is, in the orthodox per-
spective, they all escaped the “gas chambers,” it would have been much more
reasonable to have them write postcards (and maybe they even did), because
they could have answered and further reassured the Jews in Hungary who
were still awaiting their own deportation.
Waldsee was not a fictitious place, by the way. There were at least two
places with this name in Germany, one in what is today the State of Rhine-
land-Palatinate, the other in Württemberg. In the first there actually existed a
community camp (Gemeinschaftslager; Ottolenghi 1993, p. 186).
3.10. Evacuation to Mauthausen

Nyiszli recounts the various phases of the evacuation march. The column of
detainees left Birkenau at one o’clock at the night of January 19, 1945:
“It begins to grow light. We have covered about 15 kilometers in the course of
the night. […] Towards noon we arrive in Plesow, we rest for the first time
there. […] Passing nights under the open sky, hungry and thirsty, we covered
some 200 kilometers. By the time we arrived in Ratibor, our number had
dwindled to 2000 heads. […] Our loading onto the wagons goes swiftly. After
a night of waiting, we depart. I did not count how many frozen comrades we
dumped from the wagons during the course of our five-day journey! By the
time we arrived at K.Z. Mauthausen, our number had shrunk to 1500 heads.
Included in the shortfall, no doubt, were also some escapees who found a suit-
able moment for slipping away.”
The evacuation march of the Birkenau inmates, which included the 30 inmates
of the Sonderkommando (who, according to Nyiszli, were all killed on Octo-
ber 6, 1944), followed the route (omitting small locations) Auschwitz, Rajsko,
Brzeszcze, Pszczyna, Żory, Rybnik, Wodzisław Śląnski (Czech 1989, p. 971).
In this context, “Plesow” (a Polish city with this name does not exist) can only
be “Pless,” the German name of Pszczyna, where the column actually arrived
around noon on the 19th. The march’s duration given by Nyiszli (five days) is
almost exact (it actually took four days), but while Nyiszli had the column
march 200 kilometers to reach Ratibor, where the inmates were loaded onto a
train, they actually marched to Wodzisław Śląnski (German name: Loslau),
which is about 70 kilometers.
Ratibor was the German name of Racibórz, a city located about 18 kilome-
ters away from Wodzisław Śląnski. It is not mentioned at all as a place of ar-
rival or passage of the evacuated Auschwitz inmates. On January 22, the col-
umn from Birkenau arrived at Wodzisław Śląnski, and on the next day they
left on a train with destination Mauthausen, where they arrived on January 25
(Wróbel 1962, pp. 19-29).
On this scene, Nyiszli again unleashes his wanton fantasy:
“The stones are white; the castle has just been built! It was built in the Third
Reich period, with the designation K.Z. Forty thousand Spanish freedom fight-
ers who had taken refuge in France were brought here after its occupation,
along with a hundred thousand German Jewish men. […] With sufferings in-
conceivable to the human imagination they built the castle, but they were not
to be its inhabitants. They died without remnant in this sea of stone and con-
crete!” (Chapter XXXIX)
The first inmates arrived in Mauthausen on August 8, 1938, consisting of 300

Austrians and a few Germans who built the camp’s first barracks (Marsalek
1977, p. 23). The first transport of Spanish Republicans, 392 persons, arrived
in Mauthausen on August 8, 1940 (ibid., p. 91); in total, 7,200 Spaniards were
interned there over the years (ibid., p. 113). The total number of Jewish pris-
oners, from August 8, 1938 to May 4, 1945, was 24,855 men and 877 women,
of whom 14,356 died altogether (ibid., p. 204).
Nyiszli’s tale of the camp’s liberation is decidedly incredible:
“On the third day it comes about that an SS officer arrives accompanied by a
camp clerk and calls on all those who have worked in the Auschwitz cremato-
rium to present themselves. The blood runs cold within me! Do they have a list
of us? They are so damned precise and well organized, it is very likely! I think
it over and come to the conclusion that it is merely an attempt at fishing out
the secret bearers from the great crowd. If they had a list they would look at
our tattoo numbers. No one here knows me! In mute silence I wait as the anx-
ious minutes pass. I have won! I have again won life!” (Chapter XXXIX)
Yet Nyiszli himself speaks of the list of Sonderkommando members:
“The Ober gives me some sheets of paper covered with numbers which he has
been holding in his hands until now and tells me to find my number and cross
it out. In my hands is a list of the tattoo numbers of Sonderkommando mem-
bers. I take out my fountain pen; after a quick search I find and cross out my
number. When I have done this, he tells me to cross out my companions’ num-
bers as well!” (Chapter XXXV)
In practice, after having exterminated the detainees of the 12th and 13th
“Sonderkommando” because they were “bearers of unconfessable secrets,” the
SS of Auschwitz, starting with Mengele himself, completely disregarded
Nyiszli and his three assistants, but later at Mauthausen the SS tried to ferret
them out by simply walking around asking who had worked in the crematoria!
It is clear that, if the SS had really considered them so dangerous, Nyiszli
and his companions would have been identified during the registration proce-
dure, given that they had their Auschwitz registration numbers tattooed on
their arm.
Nyiszli’s liberation tale is completely unlikely because it is based on a pet-
ty and twisted psychology. He claims that he was an eyewitness to the “gas-
sing” of two million Jews in the crematoria of Birkenau, not counting those
who had been burned on the pyres; that the SS had exterminated “one thou-
sand three hundred of [his] companions” (Epilogue) because they were bear-
ers of these secrets. He was also in contact almost every day with Mengele (in
the book he mentions him more than 120 times!), whose alleged crimes
Nyiszli must have known perfectly well. In the narration of his discovery of
the killing of the twins by Mengele with an injection of chloroform into the
heart, he writes:
“If Dr. Mengele were to suspect that I know the secret of the injections, ten
doctors of the political SS would be on hand to determine my time of death!”
(Chapter VIII)
And a little further on, at the end of the same chapter:
“My hair almost stands on end when I think of all that I have accepted during
my brief life here [in the camp] and all that I must still accept, wordlessly,
hereafter until the end arrives for me as well. I knew it when I entered here,
but now that I am in possession of so many secrets, I have no doubt that I am a
dead man walking. Is it conceivable that Dr. Mengele or the Berlin-Dahlem
Institute should allow me to live?”
The fact is, however, that Mengele disappears from the story without paying
any attention to this allegedly dangerous eyewitness. The penultimate time
Mengele is mentioned by Nyiszli is in Chapter XXXVI, sometime between
November 17, 1944 and January 10, 1945:
“One day, quite unexpectedly, Dr. Mengele arrives. He seeks us out in our
room; he guesses that we will not be in the dissection hall where, for days
now, we have had nothing to do. He tells us that, by higher orders, K.Z.
Auschwitz is to be completely liquidated – not the inhabitants in this case, he
means the institution itself. Among the crematoria, two will be demolished; the
third will remain for the time being for the cremation of the camp’s dead. We
four will be moving with the dissection-hall equipment, the museum specimens
and the archives to Crematorium IV. It will remain in operation. I and II are
marked for immediate destruction!”
The next and last reference to Mengele is at the beginning of Chapter
XXXVIII:
“Our days went by quietly, without incident. Dr. Mengele, so we heard, had
departed from Auschwitz. There’s a new doctor at the K.Z., which, starting
from New Year’s Day, has officially ceased to be a K.Z. and become an Ar-
beitslager, that is, a labor camp. Everything here is in ferment and decay!
On January 10, a newspaper comes into my hands from which I learn of the
launch of the Russian offensive.”
According to the logic that Nyiszli attributes to Mengele and the SS, the
camp’s liquidation necessarily implied Nyiszli’s physical liquidation. If we
follow his narration, however, Mengele left without bothering to liquidate this
crucial witness. This is even more senseless than it seems, because Mengele
actually left Birkenau after Nyiszli, on January 18, 1945, to be exact! (Kubica
1997, p. 421)
PART 4:
Nyiszli’s Testimony in the Context of
Trials and Other Testimonies

4.1. Detainees and SS Men Mentioned by Nyiszli

Nyiszli quoted in his writings the names of several detainees and SS men of
Birkenau with whom he had direct contact. The detainees were mostly physi-
cians. I list them here in the order they were mentioned by him:
Sentkeller, Lewy, Grósz, Epstein, Bendel, Heller, Dénes Görög, Adolf
Fischer, József Körner, Olleé, other unspecified individuals, Dina, Michel, a
certain Pipel, and a certain Dayan. In 1948, Daniel Bennamia joins that list.
The most peculiar thing is that Nyiszli never mentions the registration number
of any other inmate. Even more peculiar is the fact that, of the 900 members
of the four Birkenau crematoria’s Sonderkommando (such was its maximum
strength in July-August 1944), whom Nyiszli had the task of assisting from a
medical point of view, he mentions only two by name: Dr. Bendel and Olleè
(Olère)!
Although Bendel and Bennamia were also members of the Sonderkomman-
do and survived, Nyiszli claimed to have been the only survivor. Explaining
this striking contradiction would have deserved the attention of Nyiszli’s fan-
tasy.
4.1.1. Sentkeller
In Chapter II of his book, Nyiszli introduces this individual as follows:
“Dr. Sentkeller – for that is his name, as I later learn – head doctor of Camp
Hospital ‘F’, nods understanding. He calls me to him and accompanies me to
the desk of another inmate worker.”
This is Roman Zentkeller (20497), who was a Polish military physician in-
terned at Auschwitz on September 5, 1941. He served as Camp Eldest in
Camp Sector BIIf. As such, he was directly subordinate to the SS physician in
charge of that sector, so the qualification as “head doctor of Camp Hospital
‘F,’” although inaccurate, is not completely wrong either.
4.1.2. Lewy and Grósz

Regarding these two physicians, Nyiszli states in his Chapter III:
“The chief physician of Hospital Barracks 12, Dr. Lewy, is professor at the
University of Strasbourg; his deputy, Dr. Grósz, professor at the University of
Zagreb. Both are internists. In the field of medical research, they are eminent
figures on a Europe-wide scale.”
In her 1974 article “The role of the men’s hospital camp at the Auschwitz
Camp II,” Czech provides the names and registration numbers of the medical
staff for the individual camp sectors, but a Dr. Grósz is never mentioned by
her.
The other physician, whom Nyiszli describes in TVN as “Dr. Lewy, Rob-
ert, university professor, Strasbourg, (Camp Sector F)”, was Robert Lévy, reg-
istration number 145920. Czech writes that he was deported to Auschwitz on
September 4, 1943, and that he worked in Block 12 of Camp Sector BIIf, but
she took that information from Nyiszli’s book (1974, Note 108, p. 52).
Dr. Lévy wrote an essay about his stay in Birkenau which was published in
1947 under the title “Auschwitz II (Birkenau)” (Lévy 1996, pp. 457-466). A
biographical note informs us that he was born in 1894 and was an assistant at
Surgical Clinic B of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Strasbourg.
On October 21, 1943, he was interned in the Drancy Camp, whence he was
deported to Birkenau on September 2. He arrived there on September 4, and
stayed until January 18, 1945 (ibid., p. 457). In his essay, Lévy tells what hap-
pened during the “selection” of his transport (ibid., p. 458):
“I approach an SS officer and tell him in German: ‘I am the convoy’s doctor,
what am I supposed to do with the sick?’ – He replied, ‘You are a doctor and
you speak German, that’s good; you can go to the left.’ I obey; other fellow
deportees come to join me; the women, children, those beyond fifty, the sick
are sent to the right.”
The physicians were therefore pulled from the crowds at their very arrival at
Birkenau. Note that for Lévy those unfit for labor were sent to the right, while
Nyiszli has them sent to the left. Another French physician, Robert Waitz,
who was deported from Drancy to Monowitz on October 3, 1943 (reg. no.
157261), and who was evacuated to Buchenwald on January 18, 1945, devot-
ed a special paragraph to “The History of the Right Column” (“Histoire de la
Colonne de Droite”) in a statement that also appeared in 1947. That paragraph
begins as follows (Waitz 1996, p. 470):
“This column consists of women, children, the old and the sick. They leave di-
rectly for Birkenau.”
The positioning of those fit and unfit for work in a right or left column, re-
spectively, is undoubtedly a literary dramatization. It is unknown to SS men
and prominent detainees, such as Rudolf Höss and Primo Levi. The former
Auschwitz commandant described the selection procedure as follows (Bez-
wińska/Czech 1984, p. 120):
“The railway carriages were unloaded one after the other. After depositing
their baggage, the Jews had to pass individually in front of an SS doctor, who
decided on their physical fitness as they marched past him. Those considered
capable of employment were immediately taken off into the camp in small
groups.”
And here is the description by Primo Levi, who was deported from Fossoli, It-
aly, to Auschwitz on February 22, 1944 (reg. no. 174517; Levi 1984, p. 20):
“In less than ten minutes, all of us capable men were gathered in a group.
What happened to the others – women, children, the old – we could establish
neither then nor later; the night swallowed them, purely and simply.”
In early October 1943, Lévy was transferred to the inmate infirmary (Häft-
lingskrankenbau), where he worked “for 16 months,” thus up to the evacua-
tion of Auschwitz. But he never mentions Block (or Barracks) 12 or even
Nyiszli. On the other hand, he provides other information which conflicts with
what the Hungarian physician has claimed.
Nyiszli describes twice the food administered to Auschwitz detainees:
“Subordinate to them, eagerly following their example, is the six-member
medical team. They are French and Greek doctors, of more recent vintage,
kind-hearted and caring. For three years now, they have eaten the bread of the
K.Z., bread made with horse-chestnut flour cut with sawdust.” (Chapter III)
“[…] 700 calories per day of moldy bread made from horse chestnuts, marga-
rine made from lignite, and 30 grams worth of watery salami ground from the
flesh of mangy horses. The victim washes this down with half a liter of nettle
or turnip soup, cooked without fat, flour or salt […]” (Chapter XVI)
Tadeusz Iwasko states that detainees were subject to certain food rations,
which were distributed in three meals per day. However, SS members em-
ployed in the food stores committed theft, and during the distribution of meals
the rations were further cut short by Kapos and other detainees in a position of
power. The consequence was that, instead of the 1,700 calories expected for
light work and 2,150 for heavy work, only 1,300 and 1,700 calories were ac-
tually given. In the morning, detainees received half a liter of coffee substitute
or herbal infusion called tea. Four times a week at noon, a soup with meat was
provided, and three times a week a vegetable soup (potatoes and beets). A
soup portion was about three quarters of a liter, with a nutritional value of
350-400 calories. In the evening, about 300 grams of bread and about 25
grams of margarine or a spoon of jam or curd were distributed to the inmates.
The nutritional value of the evening meal was 900-1,000 calories. The inmates
who did hard work received a supplement of bread, margarine and sausage
(Iwaszko 2000, pp. 59-61).
The theft by SS men claimed by Iwasko is at least unlikely, if not impossi-
ble. The contents of the food store were recorded in a special register, in
which the camp’s occupancy, the quantity of food by weight stored in the
warehouse, and the quantity per prisoner by weight were listed on a daily ba-
sis. This is evidenced by a log excerpt from December 11, 1944 to January 17,
1945. The register shows that the inventory was constantly replenished, so that
there was a steady relationship between the quantity of food available and the
number of prisoners.324
324
AGK, NTN, 94, pp. 127-131. See Mattogno 2016c, p. 38, and Document 13, p. 315.
Nyiszli’s absurd statements are also openly contradicted by his fellow in-
mate Robert Lévy, who wrote in this regard (Lévy 1996, p. 461):
“Everyone got up at four and a half in the morning; the Kommandos left the
camp at 6 o’clock in order to reach their workplace. Prior to this, they re-
ceived half a liter of coffee substitute or an indefinable infusion. At noon, they
interrupt their work for an hour and received soup (¾ liter to 1 liter). Then
they continued to work until 17 o’clock. After returning to the camp, an end-
less roll call followed that was particularly troublesome during rainy, snowy
or freezing weather. For dinner, they distributed half a liter of coffee or herb
tea, 300 grams of bread for the day, 40-50 grams of margarine three times a
week, with a spoonful of red beetroot jam, three times a piece of sausage, and
once a week 40 grams of cheese. The daily diet had a value of 900-1000 calo-
ries.”
Lévy also provides a description of the alleged gassing procedure, which re-
flects the propaganda rumors circulating in the camp at the time (ibid., p.
468):
“‘S.B.,’ ‘Sonderbehandlung,’ ‘special treatment’ is carried out. The ‘Sonder-
kommando,’ who live separately from all the other detainees and who are
themselves exterminated about every three months in order to eliminate em-
barrassing witnesses, cram the unfortunates into the gas chamber. The S.S.
murderer who followed the convoy in an ambulance – we nicknamed it the
‘angel of death’ – threw his ‘Cyclon’ can through a roof hatch, and a few
minutes later, the hydrogen cyanide had extinguished all of these human
lives.”
This is a rehashing of the stereotypes of the short-lived Sonderkommando (in
this case merely 3 months!) and the Red Cross van carrying the Zyklon B (the
“ambulance”). As is well-known, “Angel of Death” was the nickname of Josef
Mengele according to the orthodox narrative. Thus, as I pointed out earlier,
Mengele was at the same time the omnipresent selector on the ramp and the
carrier of Zyklon B, which instead would have been the task of two different
persons. As for the “Cyclon,” which was thrown into the “gas chamber”
through a “roof hatch,” Lèvy, without ever having set foot into a crematorium,
knew the alleged secret of its composition – hydrogen cyanide – which was
unknown to Nyiszli who claimed to have spent eight months in the Birkenau
crematoria.
Lévy presented one of the many variations of the phantasmal stories in-
vented by Auschwitz’s resistance groups (ibid., p. 464):
“The six crematoria burned day and night; facing the crowding during the
summer of 1944, the furnaces no longer sufficed, and the corpses were burned
in large pits in the birch forest. On a single night in August 1944, the entire
Gypsy camp consisting of 4,000 men, women and children was sent into the
gas. Meanwhile, the method had been perfected: a railway line had been built
ending 50 meters short of the gas chambers, so that a whole transport, wheth-
er it embarked at Drancy or Budapest, arrived directly at the place of execu-

tion. They only had to pass before the S.S. commission. This made those con-
demned approach another step closer, and then they entered an immense
freight elevator, where they were gassed. Thanks to this system, the corpses
were transported without loss of time to the cremation furnaces. In June 1944,
the record number of 22,000 incinerations was reached in 24 hours.”
Hence, there were six crematoria at Birkenau! The cremation pits were exca-
vated “in the birch forest” without reference to the courtyard of Crematorium
V or to “Bunker 2.” The new method of extermination is extremely imagina-
tive. The railway line refers obviously to the so-called Birkenau ramp, but the
story of the “immense freight elevator, where they were gassed,” is clearly ab-
surd. As to the record number of 22,000 cremations on a single day, this ech-
oes the stories of various other witnesses that come with variations and nu-
merical oscillations up to 26,000 or even 30,000 victims, but also regarding
the record-setting month. Here is one of these typical testimonies, by Kurt
Markus:325
“When the transports [from Hungary] began [arriving] on May 16, 1944, the
crematoria were no longer enough, because during the first days they had to
cremate up to 30,000 corpses.”
I will come back to this issue later. In relation to the Sonderkommando’s fate,
Lévy provides valuable information on the specific subject of this study (Lévy
1996, p. 464):
“In the summer of 1944, there was a revolt of the ‘Sonderkommando.’ Realiz-
ing from certain cues that they were about to be sacrificed, they refused to
leave their block and burned down a part of the gas chamber. The SS machine
and submachine guns, rushing in from everywhere, immediately put a stop to
this attempt at revolt. The two ‘Sonderkommando’ doctors tried to commit sui-
cide by taking a massive dose of gardenal. One of them died, the other, Dr. B.,
was saved due to our care. I was very pleased to learn that he had testified as
a prosecution witness at the Lüneburg Trial.”
The assumed dating of the revolt goes back to the stories of the early postwar
period, which was then given a “historiographic” expression. In his article
“The Revolt of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz,” Wellers proffered the
thesis of two uprisings: one is said to have happened on September 7, 1944,
the other on October 6. Little by little, the detainees working at the “Union”
workshops had stolen small amounts of gunpowder, which they handed over
to the Sonderkommando, who planned to blow up the four crematoria with
this. But on the agreed-upon day, the SS was warned by a traitor (Wellers
1949, pp. 17f.):
“On that same day, 200 men of the Sondercommando [sic] were gassed.”
325
Declaration by Kurt Markus titled “Auschwitz-Birkenau. Das grösste Vernichtungslager der
Welt.” Trial against the Auschwitz camp garrison, AGK, NTN, 135, p. 153.
It is unclear, however, how the rebels could burn down “a part of the gas
chamber.” The final part of Lévy’s account is particularly important. From it
we glean that two doctors were members of the Sonderkommando, one of
whom died while the other survived: “Dr. B.,” which clearly stands for Sigis-
mund Bendel, who indeed testified during the Lüneburg trial, that is, the Bel-
sen Trial as a witness during the hearing of October 1, 1945 (see Chapter
4.2.). Lévy does not mention Nyiszli by name in his story, although Nyiszli
could have been the only other doctor involved. According to Lévy, however,
Nyiszli had died of suicide!
As for the number of victims, Lévy regurgitates the Soviet propaganda fig-
ure that was commonly known at that time (Lévy 1996, p. 457):
“[Birkenau] has seen the extermination of more than four million human be-
ings.”
4.1.3. Epstein
On this detainee, Nyiszli writes in his book:
“The Gypsy camp has a point of special interest, the experimental barracks
located there. Professor Dr. Epstein, professor publicus ordinarius at the Uni-
versity of Prague and a pediatrician of world renown, is chief of the research
lab. He has been a prisoner of the K.Z. for four years already. His assistant is
Dr. Bendel, lecturer in the faculty of medicine at Paris.” (Chapter IV)
“Study of twin phenomena on living people. This research was carried out by
Dr. Epstein, ordinarius at the University of Prague, who had been in custody
for five years now.” (TVN)
“Prof. Dr. Epstein A., university professor, Prague (Auschwitz II, Zigeunerla-
ger [Gypsy Camp])” (TVN)
Before the German army occupied Prague, Dr. Berthold Epstein emigrated to
Norway, where he was eventually arrested by the German Security Police. A
“Questionnaire for Jews in Norway” dated March 5, 1942 and bearing the
name Epstein Berthold Israel lists the following qualifications: “Pediatrician.
University professor for childhood diseases (1930). Director of the pediatric
clinic at Prague (1932-1939).”326 On December 1, 1942, he was deported to
Auschwitz – hence, in the summer of 1944, he had been “in custody” for less
than two years, not five. In January 1943, he was transferred to the Monowitz
Camp, and in August of that year he was transferred back to the Birkenau
Gypsy camp, where he worked in the experimental barracks (Czech 1974, p.
34). This latter information, however, is not documented and seems be based
solely on Nyiszli’s statements.
326
Riksarkivet og Statsarkivene. Statspolitiet - Hovedkontoret / Osloavdelingen (Norwegian National
and State Archives. State Police – Headquarters / Oslo Department), G/Ga/L0009: Spørreskjema
for jøder i Norge, Oslo (Questionnaire for Jews in Norway, Oslo).
Dr. Epstein was one of four physicians who, on March 4, 1945, signed an
appeal in German “To the International Public” (“An die internationale Öffen-
tlichkeit”). The other three were Geza Mansfeld, university professor in Buda-
pest, Bruno Fischer, university professor in Prague, and Henri Limousin, uni-
versity professor in Clermond Ferrand.
The appeal focuses on medical experiments in Auschwitz, but without
mentioning twins or any “experimental barracks” in the Gypsy camp:327
“In various infirmary blocks of the Main Camp and of associated subcamps,
experiments on healthy living people were also performed by SS camp physi-
cians which otherwise would have been done using laboratory animals, name-
ly: by Dr. Mengele, by Dr. Endreß [Entress], Tilo [Thilo], Klein, Fischer and
Kittel [Kitt], and moreover by SS Sturmbannführer Prof. Dr. Klauberg [Clau-
berg].”
[Kitt][Clauberg]As examples, X-ray castration and pharmacological exper-
iments with injections were mentioned. The authors of the appeal reiterated
the most atrocious propaganda stereotypes of the time:
“To save petroleum, oils and fats necessary for the combustion were in parts
extracted from the corpses of those gassed. Technical oils and greases for ma-
chines were also extracted from the corpses, even washing soap.”
By signing this appeal, famous university professors of medicine endorsed
these scurrilous charges!
Dr. Epstein was also questioned by the Soviets, and an excerpt of his depo-
sition was published in the Soviet report on Auschwitz which was presented
during the Nuremberg IMT:328
“‘… Selected prisoners were sent into the gas chambers for extermination.
For several months, we saw long rows of human beings walk to the crematoria
into their death. Especially large groups were murdered in May, June and July
1944. During this time, the crematoria operated day and night, which could be
seen from the flames spewing from the chimneys. We often sensed the smell of
burning flesh, hair and fingernails. Apart from the flames coming out of the
crematoria’s chimneys, we saw two gigantic outdoor fires in those days that
blazed brightly during the night. Screams and cries as well as the barking of
the SS men’s guard dogs could be heard in the camp all night long. The unfor-
tunate victims, who due to the overcrowded crematoria were sent one by one
to their death in the open fires, sensed the fate that awaited them. …
‘I knew that my closest relatives had met that fate, and that I would not evade
it either. Roughly every other week, the camp physician, MENGELE, selected
the people who were to be killed in the crematorium. This way, some 500 chil-
dren were killed on one day. Heartbreaking scenes unfolded when the kids
were brought away, because everyone knew whence they went. During these
327
GARF, 7021-108-46, pp. 8f. (pp. 1f. of the appeal).
328
008-USSR. IMT, Vol. 39, pp. 251f.
events, the SS men and their aides distinguished themselves in exceptional bru-
tality. When we arrived at Oswiezim, I was separated from my wife and never
saw her again. Later on, I heard that she had not even been admitted into the
camp. My wife was undoubtedly killed in the usual way. In March 1944, the SS
men murdered my wife’s sister with her two children and my 38-year-old
niece. In July 1944, my sister perished as well.’”
This tale reflects the black-propaganda tales that were then regurgitated by
Nyiszli: flames shooting from chimneys, “the smell of burning flesh, hair, and
fingernails” – Nyiszli: “Burning human flesh emits an acrid smell” (Chapter
I); “The air is heavy with the smell of burning human flesh and singed hair”
(Chapter XXX) – the presence of two outdoor fires, the biweekly selections
(daily for Nyiszli) of inmates who were sent to death.
Epstein mentioned Mengele only in relation to these “selections.”
In a 1987 article co-authored by Tadeusz Szymański, who had been Ep-
stein’s colleague in the Gypsy camp, as well as Danuta Szymańska and Tade-
usz Śnieszko, Epstein was described as a department physician (Abteilungs-
arzt) and researcher at the section of Barracks 22 that hosted patients suffering
from noma (autumn 1943):
“The detainee Prof. Bertold Epstein of the University of Prague conducted re-
search on noma by order of Mengele.”
Epstein’s assistant was not Bendel, who is never even mentioned by Czech in
the article mentioned earlier, but Dr. Rudolf Weisskopf (Szymański et al.
1987, pp. 202, 204f.). This is confirmed by Helena Kubica in her article on
Mengele, where she states that the real last name of this “helper and assistant”
(“Helfer und Assistent”) of Epstein was Vitek (Kubica 1997, p. 379).
Dr. Epstein signed an affidavit on March 3, 1947 for the I.G. Farben Trial
in which he spoke exclusively of his activity at Monowitz. Among other
things, he asserted:
“There were general directives in Monowitz which prescribed that only those
detainees were to be admitted to the infirmary whose recovery would not [be
expected to] last more than 14 days.” (NI-5847, p. 1)
Hence, Dr. Epstein was even more drastic than Nyiszli, who indicated a longer
recovery period:
“It was generally known that after 3 to 4 weeks, if the sick did not heal, they
were put on a transport, that is, they were sent to be gassed at Birkenau or to
be shot at Birkenau.” (NI-11710)
The Monowitz hospital register goes until June 19, 1944. This last page con-
tains the names and serial numbers of 33 inpatient inmates, all Jews except for
four, next to their discharge date (Entlassung). Three of these Jewish inmates
were hospitalized for more than a month, specifically:
– Steinfeld, Israel (70219), until July 29 (40 days)
– Rabinowitsch, Emil (167639) until July 22 (33 days)
– Algawa, Josef (115863) until July 28 (39 days).329

Going back in that document, we find the detainee Forysz, Michel (125300),
who was admitted on June 16, 1944, and was discharged on October 17 (p.
471), Grünbaum, Jakob (144239) from June 15 to August 23 (transferred to
Birkenau; p. 470), Zorovics, Moses (A 8102) from June 15 to August 3 (p.
469), Kloppmann, Joel (79673), from June 14 to August 9 (p. 468), Wein-
berger, Alexander (A 3890) from June 14 to August 21 (p. 467), Guttmann,
Benno (171980) from June 13 to September 1 (p. 465), Pintzow, Michael
(105371) from June 12 to September 27, and Farkas, Elias (A 7965) from June
12 to October 22 (p. 464). I could go on like that for a long time, but you get
the point. Just remember that Primo Levi was hospitalized at the Monowitz
hospital on March 30, 1944, and remained there until April 20 (p. 360).
Dr. Epstein testified as a witness for the prosecution during the I.G. Farben
Trial on November 18, 1947. His testimony does not contain any reference to
Birkenau. During cross-examination by defense lawyer Hans Seidl, Epstein
claimed that the hospital for Monowitz detainees had received the verbal di-
rective to only admit prisoners for whom recovery could be expected within
two weeks. The others were sent directly to the hospital at Auschwitz, where,
it was said, selections were made for the “gas chambers.”330 However, an
analysis of the data contained in the Monowitz hospital’s register yields a total
of 2,599 detainees who were transferred to Auschwitz and Birkenau,331 mean-
ing that all of these inmates had already been admitted to the Monowitz hospi-
tal before they were transferred to the hospitals of these two adjacent camps.
This fact finds a spectacular confirmation in a defense document submitted
during the I.G. Farben Trial, called the “Hoerlein Document No. 215.”332 It is
a collection of clinical records of ten detainees, four of them Jewish, who were
admitted to Auschwitz’s inmate infirmary due to tuberculosis and who died
after many weeks or even months of treatment. The documentation includes
drawings of pulmonary radiographs, clinical records with daily progress re-
ports of the disease, and, in five cases, autopsy reports.
For instance, the Polish detainee Czeslaus Łanczy (reg. no. 122772)
worked for “Kdo Buna,” that is to say at Monowitz. He was admitted to the
infirmary on August 12, 1943, and remained there until the day of his death on
May 8, 1944. The next day his body was subjected to autopsy.
The four Jews in detention were:
329
NI-10186, p. 476; all subsequent page numbers from there unless stated otherwise.
330
Krauch et al. Volume 12, Transcript (English), p. 3991.
331
NI-10186. This number appears on the handwritten title page, which sums up the document’s con-
tents in numeric terms.
332
National Archives Microfilm Publications. Microfilm Publication M892. Records of the United
States. Nuernberg War Crimes Trials. United States of America v. Carl Krauch et al. (Case VI).
August 14, 1947 – July 30, 1948. Roll 68. Defense Exhibits. Washington, 1976.
– Michael Awerbuch (99214), Polish Jew, admitted on July 2, 1943, died on

November 9, 1943.
– Isaak Attas (115899), Greek Jew, admitted on May 22, 1943, died on Feb-
ruary 25, 1944; an autopsy was performed the next day.
– Benjamin Beresi (114941), Greek Jew, admitted on July 6, 1942, died on
April 3, 1944; an autopsy was performed the next day.
– Lejzor Weinblum (124262), Polish Jew, admitted on July 12, 1943, died on
January 12, 1944.
These documents demonstrate that, first of all, even tuberculosis patients were
regularly admitted to the inmate infirmary and remained there for several
months, and that the Auschwitz infirmary’s dissection room worked perfectly
during May and June. Hence, Nyiszli’s claims about the uniqueness of his dis-
section room and his forensic activities are lies.
Document 21 is the last page of the clinical record of the inmate Beresi
(spelled Beressy in the autopsy report). The medical diagnosis is “Lungen:
Tbc fibro-caseosa progrediens” (lungs: advanced fibrocaseous tuberculosis);
the first line, “Monatstag” gives the days of the month, the next line, “Kr.
Tage,” refers to the days of illness. The detainee died after 273 days of hospi-
talization at the inmate infirmary. Document 22 is the autopsy report prepared
by Dr. Fritz Klein on February 26, 1944 concerning the detainee Isaak Attas.
After this brief digression, we return to the witnesses. On March 3, 1947,
Dr. Vitek, who was a dermatologist, signed an affidavit (NI-4830), in which
he stated that he had been arrested in Prague on January 26, 1942, and had
been sent to Theresienstadt, whence he was transferred to Auschwitz on Octo-
ber 26 of that same year and sent to Monowitz. In February 1943, he was sent
back to Auschwitz, where he remained until June 1943. Then he was trans-
ferred to Birkenau to the Gypsy camp, where he remained until November 4,
1944, when he returned to Auschwitz. He only talked about his brief experi-
ence at Monowitz, describing that camp in terrible terms as dictated by the
propaganda of the time (he also parroted the fable of a maximum hospital-
admissions term for inmates of only 14 days). On his long activity in the Gyp-
sy camp, he did not say a single word, which indicates that he had nothing to
say about Dr. Mengele’s alleged experiments. On the other hand, if we con-
sider that Vitek’s specialization was dermatology, it is clear that his primary
task was the fight against noma.
During the I.G. Farben Trial, Vitek even testified in person on November
18, 1947, immediately before Dr. Epstein. During cross-examination by de-
fense lawyer Seidl, Vitek talked about his one-and-a-half-year stay at Birke-
nau’s “sickbay” without giving any specifics. He reported that he had been the
head physician of one of the hospital barracks, in which there were cases of
typhus, and that he was in charge of the care for about 800 patients. The whole
camp had about 16,000 inmates. It is unclear to which hospital the witness
was referring. He did not expressly mention the Gypsy camp.
Karl Hoffmann, Otto Ambros’s defense lawyer during the I.G. Farben Tri-
al, then asked Dr. Vitek – departing from the “fact” established during earlier
trials that homicidal gassings had occurred at Birkenau – whether he thought it
possible that detainees participated in them. Vitek replied:333
“Inmates did not participate in the gassing itself. The inmates participated in
the burning of the gassed bodies. This was the so-called Sonderkommando
(special detail).”
Vitek did not mention Mengele and his activities at all.
4.1.4. Heller
In Chapter XIV of his book, Nyiszli writes:
“The day after the liquidation I went on official business into Camp ‘F,’ where
I chatted with them, and so with the renowned Prague physician Dr. Heller,
former chief physician of the Czech camp, as well. From him I heard recount-
ed the sufferings and ruin of the finest flower of Czech Jewry. Since that day,
the eight doctors have died as well. They were true doctors! With profound re-
spect I pay tribute to their memory!”
Although Czech mentions a Dr. Heller, reg. no. 146703, who is said to have
been transferred to Mengele’s Camp Sector BIIf, the source of this infor-
mation is Nyiszli himself (Czech 1974, p. 48).
Miroslaw Kárný informs us that Dr. Otto Heller, for whom he gives no reg-
istration number, was the head physician of the infirmary inside the There-
sienstadt family camp (Sector BIIb), without giving any more details.334
4.1.5. Nyiszli’s Three Assistants

The episode of Mengele assigning assistants to Dr. Nyiszli can be found in
Chapter XVIII of his book:
“The first whose hand I shake is Dr. Görög Dénes, a private university lectur-
er and pathologist at the State Public Hospital of Szombathely. He is a short,
thin man of about forty-five years of age who wears thick glasses. He makes a
good impression on me. I have the feeling that we will be good friends. The
second is a short, stocky individual of about fifty years of age, with a hunched
back and a very ugly face. He is Fischer Adolf, autopsy assistant for twenty
years at the Prague Institute of Anatomy. As a Czech Jew, he has been an in-
mate of the K.Z. for five years already. The third is Dr. Körner Józef, a physi-
cian from Nice, inmate of the K.Z. for four years already. A taciturn but quali-
fied young man, he is only thirty-two years old.”
333
Official Record. United States Military Tribunals Nürnberg. Case No. 6, Tribunal 6. U.S. vs Carl
Krauch et al. Volume 12, Transcript (English), pp. 3972, 3975.
334
Kárný 1997, p. 171.
In a report of July 4, 1945, a former Jewish Auschwitz inmate from Hungary

wrote about Dénes as follows (see Section 4.3.2.):
“When our transport arrived Mengele’s first question was whether there was
a pathologist among us, and he kept repeating the same question till he found
the pathologist of the public hospital of Szombathely, Dr Dénes Görög.”
This deportee, of whom we know only his initials S.M., arrived at Birkenau on
June 30, 1944. If his claims are true, since Nyiszli was transferred from
Monowitz to Birkenau’s Sector BIIf on June 27, 1944 and stayed there for an-
other five days before being taken to Crematorium II (which took place on Ju-
ly 2; see p. 190), it follows that Mengele had already found a prosector when
he brought Nyiszli to the crematorium.
We know nothing about an Adolf Fischer. Helena Kubica mentions him
together with Görög and Körner, but only backed up by Nyiszli’s book (Kubi-
ca 1997, p. 404).
Körner’s name, as seen earlier (Section 3.1.3f.), shows up on the June 27,
1944 transfer order from Monkowitz’s inmate infirmary to Birkenau’s Sector
BIIf with the name Jecheskiel and registration number 169840, which was as-
signed to Jews deported from France on December 20, 1943 (Czech 1989, p.
684). In the list of this transport, we find a Koerner Jacheskiel, born December
6, 1912 in Rohsadna.335 Hence, by the summer of 1944, Körner had been in
Auschwitz for a few months, not for four years.
4.1.6. Dina
This detainee is mentioned by Nyiszli at the end of his Chapter IV:
“Dr. Mengele visits the experimental barracks every day. He takes part in the
research with keen interest, working together with two prominent doctors and
a painter named Dina who prepares, with great skill, the drawings needed for
the work. She is from Prague, and she has been in the Czech camp for three
years. As Dr. Mengele’s associate, she enjoys certain advantages. She is
counted among the ‘prominent’!”
This is Dinah Gottliebová. How much she was traumatized by Mengele’s al-
leged terrible experiments can be deduced from her drawing depicting her
boss on a bicycle (see Document 23)! As I noted elsewhere, she was left alive
by Mengele, along with the other “keepers of secrets,” Epstein, Vitek/Weiss-
kopf and Martyna Puszyna (Mattogno 2008, p. 12; see the Appendix). Menge-
le evidently thought he had nothing to fear from these inmates.
335
Klarsfeld 1978, Liste alphabetique du convoi N° 63 (the book is unpaginated).
4.1.7. Michel, Pipel and Dajen

About “Michel,” Nyiszli says only that he was a “French-born cook” who
worked in the non-existent kitchen of the Sonderkommando of Crematorium II
(Chapter XXIV). In the respective list of prisoners published by Friedler et al.,
no “Michel” of French origin can be found.
Pipel is not a proper name, but the term denoting servants of “prominent”
inmates and SS men, hence that person is impossible to identify.
Dajen is a Hebrew word (dajjân) that designates a judge, especially of a
rabbinical court. A “Dajan” is also mentioned in Salmen Lewental’s manu-
script.336 In the French edition of the manuscripts by the Sonderkommando
members, Ber Mark states that Leib Langfus was the “dayan” (Mark 1982, p.
297, Note 2, p. 298, Note 2). In the Auschwitz Museum’s edition of those
texts, in Lejb Langfus’ manuscript, a “Dajan of Maków” enters the scene prior
to the deportation to Auschwitz. Here a footnote states that this person was a
judge of a rabbinical court who was probably assigned to the Sonderkomman-
do after the selection.337 Since the authors write about a different person, it is
clear that this is not the same “Dajan.”
The “Dajan” was probably a figure typical of the fairy tales circulating in
the camp.
4.1.8. Bennamia [Bennahmias] and Olleé [Olère]

These are said to have been two members of the Sonderkommando. Nyiszli
never named Bennamia in his book, but in 1948 he put his name on the list of
five inmates, three of whom testified “in front of the Nuremberg tribunal”:
“Bennamia Daniel, Athenian, Athens, rue Sokrates 8, stoker of Crematorium
I.” (TVN)
This reference is rather enigmatic because, as far as is known, Daniel Ben-
nahmias did not testify in the post-war period. His first public statement was
an interview he granted in 1986. His testimony was collected in 1993 by Re-
becca Camhi Fromer in her book The Holocaust Odyssey of Daniel Ben-
nahmias, Sonderkommando (The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa). It
is not clear how Nyiszli became acquainted with the name “Bennamia” during
the years 1946 through 1948.
David Oler (artist’s name Olère) arrived at Auschwitz on March 4, 1943
with a Jewish transport from Drancy, and was registered under number
106144. Czech informs us that “all detainees selected from this transport [100
people] are assigned to the Sonderkommando” (Czech 1989, p. 430), which
336
“Handschrift von Salmen Lewental”, in: Czech et al. 1996, p. 244.
337
“Lejb (Langfus), [Aussiedlung]”, ibid., p. 98.
confirms once more that the story of the extermination of this group of prison-
ers every four months, as Nyiszli claimed, is untrue.
In his book, Nyiszli speaks of a Parisian painter in the imaginary context of
a message written by the Sonderkommando of Crematorium II destined for the
outside world. It is an imaginary context because the message, presumably
written on three sheets of parchment, was allegedly hidden inside a sofa man-
ufactured in the non-existent carpentry shop of the crematorium:
“Even if we do not survive we will ensure that the world comes to know of the
cruelty and banal wickedness, unimaginable to the human mind, of a people
that holds itself to be superior.
A message must go out to the world from here! Perhaps it will be found soon-
er, perhaps later, after years. Even then it will proclaim their guilt. The 200
members of the Crematorium I Sonderkommando will sign the message in the
consciousness of their approaching death. And the sofa bed will take it out to
the world beyond the barbed wire, to Oberscharführer Mussfeld’s apartment,
for now, in Mannheim.
The message is completed. It exhaustively describes the horrors perpetrated
here in the last few years. We name the executioners of those who perished
here. We report the approximate number of the dead. We make known the
method and instruments of extermination. The message is written on three
large sheets of parchment. The Sonderkommando clerk, a painter from Paris,
wrote it in beautiful characters, and to ensure that the writing would not fade,
it was written on the model of old parchment scrolls with India ink. The fourth
sheet contained the 200 signatures of the Kommando. The parchment sheets
were stitched together with fine silk thread. Rolled into a scroll, it was placed
in a thin, cylinder-shaped metal canister made by one of our tinsmiths which
was then soldered shut to make it air- and watertight. Our carpenters placed
this case in the wool stuffing between the springs of the sofa.
Another such message with the same text and signatures, also in a soldered
metal canister, was buried in the courtyard of Crematorium II.” (End of Chap-
ter XXI)
The Auschwitz Museum assures us that, between 1945 and 1980 at the ruins
of the Birkenau crematoria, several manuscripts of the Sonderkommando were
indeed found (Czech et al. 1996, p. 7), which were then translated and pub-
lished, as far as was possible. The one mentioned by Nyiszli was never found.
Here I make a short side note on the purpose of these messages. At least in
Nyiszli’s case it is acknowledged that, in his fantastic story, there is a logic
that is missing in the aforementioned manuscripts. In fact, as I pointed out in
1996, most striking about these manuscripts found after the war is a radical
dissonance common to them all indiscriminately: These documents are said to
have been written by members of the Sonderkommando for the historical rec-
ord, in order to inform the world of the horrors of the Birkenau “death facto-
ry.” But what do these documents contain? Sketches of the crematoria and gas
chambers? Descriptions of the structure and operation of the gas chambers?

Descriptions of the structure and operation of the cremation furnaces? The
number of Zyklon-B cans used per gassing? Lists of the transports of Jews
gassed? The number of people gassed? The number of corpses cremated?
Lists containing the names of Sonderkommando members? Lists naming the
SS men involved?
Nothing of that kind. Any information about gas chambers and gassings is
so sparse and vague that it not only conveys no new information in this regard,
but for any reader not acquainted with knowledge on the subject, these writ-
ings would actually be incomprehensible (Mattogno 1996, pp. 63-68).
As an example, I may add here that the “Lejb” manuscript, one of the
longest, devotes 89(!) pages to the antecedents, followed by an account of the
deportation train’s arrival at Auschwitz, a narration that goes on for almost
eleven pages! (Czech et al. 1996, pp. 73-129)
Returning to Nyiszli, when he wrote his book, he was unfamiliar with the
name Olère, and only as late as 1948 did he start using the distorted spelling
Olleé. He described this person as follows:
Olleé shovels the coke.” (TVN)
Another presumed member of the Sonderkommando, Dov Paisikovic, speaks
as follows of Olère:338
“Moreover a Jew from Paris called ‘Oler’ had been in the Sonderkommando
already for a long time. He was an artist painter, and in the period when I
know the Sonderkommando [since early May 1944], he had to paint paintings
exclusively for SS men.”
In a subsequent statement (August 10, 1964) written in Polish, Paisikovic
claimed to have met two Sonderkommando members from France, “one of
them was an artist, a painter, whose name was probably Oler. He did not know
and did not understand the Polish language. He painted various paintings for
the SS in the ‘dentists’ room.’”339
Paisikovic’s statement not only stands in contrast to Nyiszli’s, but also to
the themes of Olère’s paintings (see Klarsfeld 1989). It must be assumed that
Olère did not testify during any trial, did not make any official deposition, did
not write any report, but entrusted his testimony to some fifty paintings deal-
ing with such vast and disparate themes that, if they represented real scenes,
Olère would have been present everywhere in the camp. Actually, as I have
338
Declaration by D. Paisikovic, Vienna, October 17, 1963, p. 3. RvO, c[21]96.
339
APMO, Zbiór Oświadczenia, Vol. 44, p. 98.
shown elsewhere,340 Olère’s paintings are simple illustrations of the propa-

ganda spread by the camp’s resistance movement: visual propaganda instead
of written propaganda.
The strange fact is that Paisikovic, like Nyiszli, was evacuated to Mau-
thausen, then to Melk, and finally released by the Americans from the
Ebensee Camp,341 but the two never mentioned each other. However, while
Nyiszli claims that, on the day of the evacuation, only four members of the
Sonderkommando were still alive – he and his three assistants – Paisikovic as-
serted:338
“82 prisoners of the Sonderkommando – including us of the Sonderkommando
of Crematorium II – survived until the evacuation of Auschwitz. On evacua-
tion, on January 18, 1945, disorganization already reigned among the SS.”
4.1.9. Rottenführer Holländer, Eindenmüller, Dr. Klein

Rottenführer Holländer and Rottenführer Eindenmüller are mentioned by Ny-
iszli in his Chapter XXIV, together with Oberscharführer Seit (recte: Seitz).
Holländer is mentioned only by Nyiszli (and plagiarized by Filip Müller). It is
unknown whether he ever existed. Eindenmüller appears in the card file of
Auschwitz SS members, but his deployment to the crematoria is likewise only
claimed by Nyiszli and, in his wake, by Müller.342
Nyiszli states that “Dr. Klein, SS Surgeon-Major,” was still in Birkenau on
January 1, 1945 (Chapter XXXVII). Since that is New Years Day, getting that
date wrong is quite unlikely. Dr. Fritz Klein, however, was merely an SS Un-
tersturmführer (lieutenant, the rank of a major corresponded to Sturmbannfüh-
rer), and he was transferred to the Neuengamme Camp on December 15, 1944
(Phillips 1949, p. 717).
4.1.10. Mengele
Nyiszli attributes three types of crimes to Dr. Mengele:
1) selection at the ramp,
2) research on twins with killing the individuals studied,
3) research on the degeneration of the “Jewish race.”
The crimes of the first type evidently concern selections for the “gas cham-
bers.” Here, Nyiszli’s statements are false and unfounded even from an ortho-
dox point of view:
340
Mattogno 2015a, Chapters 10.2.4., 13.3.2., 18.4.6.3.
341
Declaration by D. Paisikovic, August 10, 1964; APMO, Zbiór Oświadczenia, Vol. 44, pp. 96f. S.
Klarsfeld speaks of Mauthausen and Melk (1989, p. 7); Sonja Knopp informs us that he was liber-
ated at Ebensee on May 6, 1945 (Knopp 2009, p. 68, Note 283).
342
Piper 2000, “List of SS Men Employed Directly in the Gas Chambers and Crematoria,” pp. 235f.
“One after another, the Hungarian Jewish transports arrive at the ramp. It of-
ten happens that two trains will arrive together and pour forth from their in-
sides thousands of people.
What Dr. Mengele does at the ramp cannot even be called selection anymore.
His arm moves in only one direction. To the left! Entire trains thus go, without
remainder, into the gas chambers or onto the pyres.” (Chapter XIV)
As I pointed out earlier, no less than 107,200 Hungarian Jews were either reg-
istered or sent to the Birkenau transit camp, and no significant Holocaust his-
torian asserts that entire transports were exterminated.
Nyiszli claims that Mengele studied “phenomena such as none will ever
decipher, the cause of multiple births” (Chapter XXX), and in Chapter VIII,
he points out that the immediate purpose was
“the multiplication of the German race! The end goal, in turn, is that there
should be enough Germans to replace the Czech, Hungarian, Polish and
Dutch peoples, condemned to extermination, in the areas inhabited by these
peoples and now declared Lebensraum for the Third Reich.”
This is a puerile and nonsensical accusation. This also applies to the alleged
studies on the degeneration of the “Jewish race,” which is not a National So-
cialist theory, but Nyiszli’s pathetic invention. He claims:
“Just as race research is built upon a false theory, the idea of a superior race
is pseudoscientific; so too is Dr. Mengele’s twin-research work pseudoscien-
tific and based on a false theory. False as well, and leading to massacre here,
is the degenerative theory of dwarves and cripples with which they hope to
prove the inferiority of the Jewish race.” (Chapter XIX)
According to this theory,
“the Jewish people, which, despite counting six thousand years of history, has
had no right to exist for centuries now, because in the course of their thou-
sands of years of existence they have degenerated into dwarves and cripples.”
(Chapter XIX)
Mengele was not “a race biologist” (Chapter XV), but an anthropologist. His
duties at Auschwitz were summarized by the SS garisson physician Dr. Wirths
in an “Evaluation of SS Hauptsturmführer (of the reserve) Dr. Josef Mengele
born on March 16, 1911” dated 19 August 1944:343
“SS Hauptsturmführer Dr. Josef Mengele serves his duty at the office of the SS
garrison physician Auschwitz, since May 30, 1943 [...]
During his acitivities at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, he has applied his
knowledge practically and theoretically as a camp doctor during the fight
against severe epidemics. With circumspection, perseverance and vigor, he
has fulfilled all the tasks assigned to him often under the most difficult condi-
tions to the complete satisfaction of his superiors and has shown himself capa-
343
Kubica 1997, pp. 414f.; subsequent page numbers from there, unless otherwise stated.
ble of coping with every situation. In addition, as an anthropologist, he has

eagerly used the short time off-duty at his disposal to educate himself, and has
made a valuable contribution with his work by evaluating the scientific mate-
rial of anthropological science made accessible to him by his office. His
achievements are therefore to be described as excellent. [...]
In the most conscientious fulfillment of his duty as a physician, he contracted
typhus during the combat against epidemics in Auschwitz. Due to his special
achievements, he was awarded the War Merit Cross II. Cl[ass]. w/Sw[ords].
In addition to his medical knowledge, Dr. M[engele]. has special knowledge as
an anthropologist. He appears to be suitable for any other assignment and al-
so for the next higher assignment.”
From this document it appears that Mengele’s main job was camp physician,
and as such he distinguished himself in the fight against epidemics. He per-
formed his activity as an anthropologist in his spare time (!), hence without a
specific superior directive.
From the documents on Mengele reproduced by Kubica in the article men-
tioned earlier, it is evident that he performed his anthropological activity only
in vivo, as Nyiszli would say, namely research in the areas of anthropometry
(pp. 388, 393) and clinical psychiatry (p. 392). The documentation also in-
cludes analyses of x-ray images, urine and blood samples taken from inmates
(pp. 394f.), a clinical record (pp. 398f.), as well as patient charts with tempera-
ture curves (pp. 400-402). He was also involved in research on the noma epi-
demic raging in the Gypsy camp, as is demonstrated by him sending the head
of a 12-year-old boy to the Hygienic-Bacteriological Research Institute of the
Waffen SS Southeast (Hygienisch-Bakteriologische Untersuchungsstelle der
Waffen-SS, Südost) for histological examination (p. 394). The sender was the
“Inmate Infirmary Gypsy Camp Auschwitz II, BIIe” (“Häftlingskrankenbau
Zigeunerlager Auschwitz II, BIIe”). Noma, which spread among the children
in this camp sector, is a disease that develops in the mouth and destroys the
face, which is why it is also called noma facies.
Nyiszli paints Mengele as an omnipotent character who could order the
“gassing” of entire sectors of the Birkenau Camp, as in the case of Sector
BIIc:
“Dr. Mengele rises from his seat and, as if he has just made up his mind on
the question, he says to Dr. Thilo: ‘I am no longer in a position to feed the de-
bilitated residents of Camp C who are not working. I will liquidate them within
two weeks!’” (Chapter XXVII)
“The camp’s numbers had been reduced by ten thousand heads, and the K.Z.
archives had been increased by one piece of paper. On the piece of paper
stood a brief report: ‘The section of Concentration Camp Auschwitz inhabited
by Czechs, the so-called Czech camp, has been liquidated due to a high inci-
dence of cases of petechial typhus!’ Signed: Dr. Mengele, Hauptsturmführer, I.
Lagerarzt.” (Chapter XIV)
It is naïve and childish for any person to think that a mere Hauptsturmführer,
hence captain, had the obligation to feed the detainees of an entire camp sec-
tor, and that he had the competence to kill them if he could not feed them.
Just as puerile is Nyiszli’s claim that Mengele was “containing the spread
of epidemic disease” by “gassing”:
“Located next to the Czech camp is Camp C, the camp for Hungarian women;
the number of its inhabitants often reaches 60,000, despite the transports
transferred each day to more-distant camps. In this overcrowded camp it hap-
pened one day that the doctors found symptoms of scarlet fever among a few of
the inhabitants of one of the barracks. On Dr. Mengele’s orders, this barracks
as well as the ones lying to its left and right were placed under lockdown. The
barracks lockdown lasted from morning to evening, when trucks arrived and
took the inhabitants of all three barracks to the crematorium. Such were the
effective measures ordered by Dr. Mengele for containing the spread of epi-
demic disease.
The Czech camp and the three barracks of Camp C thus fell victim to Dr.
Mengele’s actions to contain the epidemic. Fortunately, the barracks doctors
caught on in good time, and if an infectious disease raised its head anywhere,
they were careful not to bring it to the attention of the SS medical authorities.
If possible, they hid such patients in some out-of-the-way box in the barracks
and cared for them according to the meager means available, but they did not
refer them to the hospital because there the SS doctors check the patients every
day, and the emergence of an infectious disease could bring on the complete
liquidation of the patient’s respective barracks, as well as 2-3 of the neighbor-
ing barracks. In the medical jargon of the SS, this method is known as broad-
based epidemic containment. The result of an action is 1-2 truckloads of ash-
es.” (Chapter XV)
It is unclear how the inmate physicians could conceal sick prisoners, if the
dead had to be present also during the roll call:
“If the barracks has any dead – there are 5 or 6 each day, sometimes as many
as 10 – they too figure in the roll call. They must stand there at the end of the
row, propped up on either side by a pair of prisoners, as long as the counting
goes on, for dead or alive, the headcount must add up!” (Chapter III)
But this is not the issue. From extant documents it results undeniably that
“containment of epidemics” was carried out with medical measures, and that
patients suffering from infectious disease were regularly admitted to the in-
mate hospitals (see Mattogno 2016c, Chapters 2 to 4, pp. 42-85).
4.1.11. Was Nyiszli Jewish at all?

The question may seem like a bad joke, but Nyiszli’s book contains many ex-
pressions that make it legitimate. At the beginning of Chapter VII, he writes:
“Within a few minutes, the doors are flung to one side and the wagons dis-
gorge from within themselves the chosen people of Israel”
This observation has all the air of brutal sarcasm. In Chapter XII, he states:
“After all, in this time of racial laws, even in my civilian life, I was banned
from the medical treatment of Christian, or rather, Aryan patients.” (My em-
phasis)
In his account in Chapter XXXI of the killing of the two deportees from Litz-
mannstadt, father and son, he makes another surprising statement:
“I ask them whether they want anything to eat. They are very hungry, they say.
I tell one of the Sonderkommando to bring food for them. They immediately
receive a plentiful portion of meat stew with macaroni. Only the
Sonderkommando has such food. They immediately start in on it and greedily
consume the fine food which they have not tasted for so long. They do not
know, though I do, that they are consuming their death-house meal, their ‘last
supper.’” (My emphasis)
And furthermore:
“It is November 1, 1944, the Day of the Dead.” (Chapter XXXII)
The Jewish New Year (rosh ha-shanah) falls in the beginning of September
yet is completely ignored by Nyiszli, who instead observes (Chapter
XXXVII):
“Amid such doubts and hopes, the first of January 1945 arrived. New Year’s!”
Precisely when claiming his affiliation to Judaism, Nyiszli denies it with a bla-
tant blasphemy:
“What a horrible drama of our Jewish existence that I, a Jewish doctor, must
examine them with precise clinical methods before they go to their deaths, and
then dissect their still-warm bodies. I feel this horrible irony of our Jewish
destiny with such passion that my nerves, in my impotence, are strained almost
to the point of madness.
By whose will has this series of horrors descended upon our unfortunate peo-
ple? Perhaps by God’s! He has long since hidden himself in shame, then, for
even He did not will this much.” (Chapter XXXI; My emphasis)
It must be agreed that Nyiszli was really a Jew of his own class!
4.2. Dr. Charles Sigismund Bendel, Sonderkommando

4.2.1. A Professional Witness
Dr. Bendel can be seen as a kind of professional witness. He testified for the
prosecution during the Belsen Trial (staged from September 17 to November
17, 1945),344 during which he was interrogated by Colonel Backhouse at the
hearing on October 1, 1945 (Phillips 1949, pp. 130-135). On October 21,
1945, he also signed a declaration for this trial that was recorded as “Produc-
tion N° 24”,345 which later became Document NI-11390. Bendel then partici-
pated in the Tesch Trial (staged from March 1-8, 1946; United Nations…
1947, Vol. I), during which he was interrogated by Major Draper on the sec-
ond day of the trial, March 2, 1946.346 In 1946, a statement by Bendel ap-
peared in the book Témoignages sur Auschwitz (Testimonies on Auschwitz).347
On October 7, 1947, Bendel was questioned by police officer Pierre Berillet,
who belonged to the National Security Directorate of the French Department
for the Interior. This resulted in a protocol that was included in the files of the
trial against the Auschwitz camp garrison (staged from November 25 to De-
cember 16, 1947; see Bendel 1947). Bendel also appeared as a witness for the
prosecution during the I.G. Farben Trial on March 18, 1948 (see Bendel
1948).
4.2.2. Nyiszli and Mengele

Bendel was born in 1904 in Piatra, Romania, but moved to France where he
was arrested on November 4, 1943 and interned in the Drancy camp. From
there he was deported to Auschwitz on December 10, 1943. His name (“Ben-
del, Sigismund”) is actually registered in the deportation list of Transport No.
64, which departed from Drancy on December 7, 1943. The transport included
1,000 people, of whom 267 men were enrolled in the camp on December 10
with numbers 167442-167708 (Bendel’s number was 167460).348 According
to his account, Bendel was sent directly to Monowitz, where he remained
from December 10, 1943 to January 1, 1944, the day he was transferred to
Auschwitz and assigned to Block 28, where he remained until February 26,
344
United Nations… 1947, Vol. II, pp. 93-124. Bendel’s deposition is summarized in 10 lines on p.
21. For a complete account of the trial see Phillips 1949.
345
TNA. WO 309-1603.
346
The minutes were then classified as Document NI-11953. The initials “NI” (Nazi Industrialists)
refer to the I.G. Farben Trial.
347
This declaration is headlined “Le Sonderkommando” and signed by “Dr. Paul Bendel, 167.460.”
Krewer et al. 1946, pp. 159-164.
348
Klarsfeld 1978, “Convoi N° 64 en date du 7 Decembre 1943” and “Liste alphabetique du convoi
N° 64.”
1944. The following day, he was sent to the Birkenau Gypsy camp and stayed
there until June 1. On June 2, he was assigned to the Sonderkommando of the
crematories as a physician. He held this position until January 17, 1945.
Within the framework of the present study, Bendel’s testimony is particu-
larly important because he claims to have been in a position where he would
have been a colleague of Nyiszli. Hence, these two physicians were together
in the Sonderkommando since the beginning of July 1944 until the evacuation
of the Auschwitz Camp, that is, roughly six and a half months.
Nevertheless, Bendel never mentioned Nyiszli in his numerous statements,
although he did mention the presence of other physicians in the Sonderkom-
mando (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 159):
“We were three doctors assigned to this task.”
“Q. Dr. Bendel, you were the doctor in this sonderkommando [sic] in Ausch-
witz-Birkenau?
A. I was one of the three doctors who were attached to this sonderkomman-
do.” (Bendel 1948, p. 9588)
He never mentioned the names of the other two doctors. Bendel even spoke of
the dissection room, but in reference to the “twin Crematoria 1 and 2,” which,
“with their ultra-modern dissecting room and their museum of anatomical ex-
hibits,” were among the best ever done in this line (Krewer et al. 1946, p.
160).
For Nyiszli, however, only one such dissection room existed, that of Crem-
atorium I (II in today’s nomenclature), of which he was in charge, yet without
any “museum of anatomical exhibits.”
In this context, Bendel declared elsewhere (NI-11390, p. 7; Engl. version):
“Dr. Peter MENGLE [sic] was in charge of the medical side of the crematori-
ums and had a dissection room in one of them.”
During the I.G. Farben Trial, Prosecutor Minskoff asked Bendel whether he
wanted to make any additions or corrections to Document NI-11953, which
had been filed by the prosecution as Exhibit No. 1811. Bendel replied that he
had in front of him the German translation of this document, which contained
a mistake in a sentence translated into English in the courtroom as follows:
“Did you ever see the Prussic acid gas which was used?
I have seen the cans. I also dissected some of the corpses of people who were
gassed.” (Bendel 1948, p. 9587)
In the German version of this document, the translated exchange reads pretty
much the same (NI-11953, p. 3; German translation):
“Q.[estion] Have you ever seen Prussic acid gas that was used?
A.[nswer] I have seen the cans. I dissected some of the corpses of those people
who had been gassed”
In the English translation of Bendel’s deposition made during the Tesch Trial,
the passage quoted above reads as follows (NI-11953, p. 2, English version):
“Q. Did you ever see this prussic acid gas which was being used?
A. I have seen the tins. I have opened some of the bodies of those people who
had been gassed.”
Bendel explained (Bendel 1948, p. 9587):
“This is a mistake in translation, since I never said that I dissected any corps-
es. This was done by a special detail of doctors in the concentration camp
crematorium. What I wanted to say is that I saw the empty containers after the
gassing had taken place.”
From this it seems to be clear that Bendel didn’t know anything about Nyiszli
and only very little about the dissection room inside Crematorium II at Birke-
nau.
Bendel testified in French, and his statements were translated into English;
the English translation was in turn translated into German. If there was a
translation mistake from French to English, it is a mystery how a sentence
about empty cans seen after a gassing can turn into “I have opened some of
the bodies of those people who had been gassed.”
Like Nyiszli, Bendel was also chosen directly by Mengele:
“Question: In June, 1944, was your employment changed?
Answer: Indeed it was changed. Dr. Mengele gave me the honour to attach me
to the crematorium.” (Phillips 1949, p. 131)
Asked about his duties as a Sonderkommando physician, he replied in a very
imaginative way (ibid., p. 135):
“In case somebody had a wound amongst the people of the Sonderkommando.
I remember one case, when one man was working, and he burned both his feet
in the human, searing fat, which was so hot. It was my duty to give him a
dressing.”
Regarding his activity in the Gypsy camp, where he stayed for three months,
Bendel was rather evasive. The general narrative is this (ibid., p. 131):
“On 1st Januray, 1944, I was transferred to the main camp, and on 27th Feb-
ruary, 1944, into the gipsy camp in Birkenau, where I worked as a doctor. The
senior doctor was called Dr. Mengele. He was in charge of the whole medical
side of that camp, particularly infectious diseases in which Professor Epstein
from Prague and myself assisted. Dr. Mengele engaged in the research of in-
jections in the crematorium. These were injections which were supposed to
produce instantaneous death, and in the gipsy camp he worked mainly on
reserach tests against twins. He continued to make all sorts of tests on these
twins, but it was not enough. He wanted to see them dead, to see what they
looked like.”
While confirming his working relationship with Dr. Epstein, Bendel knew
nothing about the “experimental barracks” at the Gypsy camp, in which he is
said to have worked as Epstein’s assistant, if we follow Nyiszli. And it is clear
that he knew only from hearsay about Dr. Mengele’s alleged research activi-
ties.
As pointed out earlier, Nyiszli mentioned Bendel as a member of the
Sonderkommando only in 1948, hence at the end of the long storyline of his
six statements. Nyiszli probably had only indirect knowledge of this, because
he introduced him as a “Sonderkommando physician of Crematorium I,” while
Bendel claimed to have been active as a physician at all four crematoria.
Despite the alleged coexistence of Nyiszli and Bendel in the same place
and at the same time, they not only knew nothing of each other but recounted
what they had “seen” in a completely different way. Before comparing their
statements, it is necessary to determine the degree of Bendel’s trustworthiness
as a witness.
4.2.3. The Crematoria

On the history of the Birkenau crematoria, Bendel knew only what could be
derived from the rumors circulating in the camp (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 161):
“The foundations of these imposing red-brick buildings were laid in March
1942. Thousands of prisoners worked on them and died in order to build
them.”
As indicated earlier, Nyiszli amplified the tone of this rumor in his book by
writing that “tens of thousands of prisoners [had] built these gigantic build-
ings” and that “Every stone in these buildings is stained with the blood of tens
of thousands of unlucky Jewish deportees” (Chapter VI).
The date indicated by Bendel is incorrect; excavation works for the founda-
tions of Crematorium II, the first of the four to be built, began on June 2, 1942
and ended in July (Mattogno/Deana 2015, p. 232), so the foundations of the
building were not laid before August. Bendel added (Krewer et al. 1946, p.
161):
“Completed in January 1943, their inauguration was honored by the presence
of Himmler in person […]”
During the I.G. Farben Trial, Bendel told a variation of this fairy tale:
“An eye witness told me about the visit of Himmler, when the crematorium I
and II [= II and III] were inaugurated. At that visit, as a special spectacle a
thousand people were gassed who had been brought to Germany into the camp
from France.” (Bendel 1948, p. 9609)
Crematorium II came into operation on February 20, 1943, but its “inaugura-
tion,” that is, the official hand-over procedure of the facility to the camp au-
thorities, took place on March 31 (Mattogno/Deana 2015, pp. 237f.).
Czech states that this “special attraction” event took place on March 13,
1943, when a transport of 2,000 Jews from Krakow arrived. 484 men among
them were admitted into the camp (reg. nos. 107990-108409), and so were 24
women (reg. nos. 38307-38330). The remaining 1,492 are said to have been
gassed. This claim is based on Henryk Tauber’s testimony.349 According to a
list of transports clandestinely compiled by a group of inmates working in the
camp’s Political Department under the supervision of Kazimierz Smoleń, the
above-mentioned registration numbers were assigned on March 14, 1944
(NOKW-2824).
It is a well-known fact that, after the visit of July 17 and 18, 1942, Himm-
ler never return to Auschwitz. It is just as well-known that Crematorium III’s
hand-over procedure (Übergabeverhandlung) took place on June 24, 1943
(Mattogno/Deana 2015, p. 244).
Hence, Bendel accumulated a surprising number of errors in just a few
lines: 1) Crematorium II was not inaugurated in January, but in March 1943;
2) Crematoria II and III were not inaugurated together; 3) Himmler did not at-
tend the inauguration of any crematorium; 4) according to the orthodox narra-
tive, the alleged gassing victims came from Poland rather than from France,
and numbered almost 1,500 rather than a thousand.
Incredibly, this tale was repeated in its essentials by Walter Rosenberg aka
Rudolf Vrba at the beginning of the 1960s. He even claimed to have been an
eyewitness of this event (Vrba/Bestic 1963, pp. 15f.):
“Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz again in January, 1943. This time I was
glad to see him arrive [...]. He was to watch the world’s first conveyor belt
killing, the inauguration of Commandant Hoess's brand new toy, his cremato-
rium”
On that occasion, he said, “a special transport of 3,000 Polish Jews” was
“gassed.”
According to Bendel, Crematoria II and III had 16 cremation furnaces each
with a capacity of 2,000 corpses per day, and Crematoria IV and V had eight
furnaces each with a capacity of 1,000 corpses per day,350 resulting in a total
of 6,000 corpses per day. Bendel copied this capacity from Alfred Wetzler’s
report that was published in November 1944 by the War Refugee Board, but,
as will be seen later (Section 4.3.1.), Wetzler had claimed nine four-muffle
furnaces each for Crematoria II and III, while Bendel claimed 16 furnaces
(meaning muffles), which can be interpreted as five furnaces of three muffles
each – the actual situation – plus the waste incinerator located in the chimney
wing (Müllverbrennungsofen), which was not used for cremations. How
349
Czech 1989, p. 440; Czech speaks of a transport of Jews from Krakow with 2,000 persons, of
which 484 men (107990-108409) and 24 women (38307-38330) were admitted to the camp. The
remaining 1,492 were allegedly gassed.
350
Bendel 1947, p. 210r; Krewer et al. 1946, p. 161.
Wetzler’s 36 muffles could have had the same cremation capacity as Bendel’s
16 muffles is a mystery.
Even for Bendel huge flames shot out of the crematorium chimneys:
“In the period from July – and particularly in that month, the smoke and
flames rose up to about ten meters” (Bendel 1948, p. 9606),
which, as I have already pointed out earlier, is utterly absurd as to the flames.
Bendel reports another fantastic story circulating around the camp:
“At the time I entered the Sonderkommando, the throughput of these furnaces
had been deemed insufficient, and they were replaced by three cremation pits,
each 12 meters long, 6 meters wide and 1 m 50 deep. The capacity of these pits
was formidable: a thousand people in an hour.” (Emphasis in original; Kre-
wer et al. 1946, p. 161)
Aerial photographs taken in 1944 never show three huge smoking sites in the
Birkenau area, but always only one which was very small (see Mattogno
2016b), and the cremation capacity claimed by Bendel is absurd (see Mat-
togno/Kues/Graf, Vol. 2, Chapter 12).
Among the legends circulating inside the camp, the story of the cremato-
ria’s replacement by cremation pits was so widespread that it was even men-
tioned by Judge Jan Sehn (1946, p. 126):
“The experience of August 1944 of cremating corpses in pits proved that this
was the most economical method, so the crematoria ceased their activity, and
since then corpses were burnt only in pits, and according to the project, the
sixth crematorium was based on the principle of burning corpses in open
pits.”
Bendel could not resist the temptation to tell another propaganda lie, that of
the recovery of human fat. The capacity of the ditches, in his view,
“was further increased by breaking open a conduit to channel human fat to a
recovery pit.” (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 161)
As I have shown elsewhere (Mattogno 2014), this is arrant nonsense, because
human fat has an ignition temperature of just 184 °C,351 much lower than the
ignition temperature of dry wood, which ranges between 325 and 350°C.
4.2.4. The “Gas Chambers”

Bendel gives a precise description of the crematoria’s “gas chambers.” I will
deal with this in detail when comparing it with Nyiszli’s description, since
both witnesses claim to have seen them with their own eyes and at the same
time. This also applies to their accounts of the Sonderkommando, whose com-
parison is even more surprising. Here I merely state that for Bendel Cremato-
351
The lowest temperature at which fat emits sufficient vapor in air to cause ignition upon contact
with a flame or spark.
ria II and III each had 2 “gas chambers” measuring 10 m × 4 m or 10 m × 5 m

and a height of 1.5 m, with a claimed capacity of 1,000 people each. Cremato-
ria IV and V also had two “gas chambers” measuring 6 m × 3 m × 1.5 m, with
a capacity of 500 people each.
This statement by itself should suffice to indict Bendel as a foolish impos-
tor, because the premises he claims to have seen had completely different di-
mensions. I have already mentioned earlier that Morgue #1 – the alleged “gas
chamber” of the Crematoria II and III – measured 30 m × 7 m × 2.41 m. Even
if it was indeed divided into two rooms – a claim not supported by any docu-
ment – this still would have resulted in two rooms measuring 15 m × 7 m ×
2.41 m. During the I.G. Farben Trial, Bendel, harassed by a defense lawyer,
tried to somehow circumvent the absurdities resulting from his claims (Bendel
1948, p. 9600):
“I can not give exact measurement of it. I just guessed that it was. I said 10
meters by 4 meters, and this is quite uncertain. I am not quite sure. It’s just an
estimate on my part.”
Even if we accept this as an excuse for his grossly wrong estimates regarding
the lengths and widths of the rooms, it cannot explain the height he gave, be-
cause here the quantitative question turns into a qualitative one: any person of
medium height entering a room which is merely 1.5 m high has to bend over,
while one has a space of some 70 centimeters above one’s head in a room 2.4
meters high. How could anyone commit such an absurd error?
As for Crematoria IV and V, according to Franciszek Piper, each of them
had four “gas chambers,” all of different sizes, namely (Piper 2000, p. 162):
– Chamber 1: 7.72 m × 12.35 m
– Chamber 2: 8.40 m × 11.69 m
– Chamber 3: 3.70 m × ?
– Chamber 4: 3.70 m × ?
Chambers 3 and 4 resulted from an unequal division of a room originally
measuring 3.70 m × 11.69 m. The height of all these chambers was 2.20 me-
ters.
How can we reconcile Bendel’s two “gas chambers” of 6 m × 3 m × 1.5 m
with the four “gas chambers” of the aforementioned dimensions claimed by
the orthodoxy? And here as well, how could it have been possible to mis-
estimate a ceiling that was 2.20 meters from the floor as being merely 1.5 me-
ters high?
Bendel was questioned about the absurdities resulting from his statements.
His responses evince chutzpah and obtuseness. During the Tesch Trial, de-
fense lawyer Dr. Otto Zippel cross-examined the witness as follows (NI-
11953, p. 4):
“Q. You have said that the gas chambers were ten metres by four metres by
one metre sixty centimetres: is that correct?
A. Yes.
Q. Is it right that they are 64 cubic metres?
A. I am not very certain. This is not my strong side.
Q. How is it possible to get a thousand people into a room of 64 cubic metres?
A. This one must ask oneself. It can only be done by the German technique.
Q. Are you seriously suggesting that in a space of half a cubic metre you could
put ten men?
A. The four million people who were gassed in Auschwitz are the witnesses.”
In terms of surface area, 1,000 people in a room measuring 10 m × 4 m (40
m²) correspond to a density of (1,000 ÷ 40 =) 25 people per square meter!
From this point of view, Bendel was a new Gerstein. But the absurdities do
not end there. Bendel also stated (ibid., p. 2):
“Each chamber was 10 metres long and 4 metres wide. The people were herd-
ed in so tightly that there was no possibility even to put in one more. It was a
great amusement for the SS to throw in children above the heads of those who
were packed tightly into these rooms.”
In this interrogation, Bendel had stated that the “gas chambers” were “about
5ft 8ins” high (ibid.), or some 1.70 m, but, as seen above, he considered a
height of 1.60 meters to be correct. In the statement of October 21, 1945, he
explicitly stated that these rooms were “1 1/2 meters high” (NI-11390, p. 1).
But this makes little difference: whether the height was 1.5 m or 1.6 m,
how could it be possible to hurl children over the heads of the people with
such a low ceiling? As pointed out earlier, in order to enter these “gas cham-
bers,” most victims would have had to bend over because the rooms were
lower than the average height of a person.
For the “gas chambers” of Crematoria IV and V, the situation would have
been even worse, because a room of m 3 m × 6 m × 1.5 m, hence 18 m² and
27 m³, is said to have contained 500 people, or on average nearly 28 people
per square meter and 18.5 per cubic meter!
The only possible explanation – apart from calling Bendel a liar – is that
the victims were Lilliputian Jews!
Despite this fantastic overcrowding of 28 people per square meter, the vic-
tims were surprisingly able to move around quietly (Phillips 1949, p. 132):
“One heard cries and shouts and they started to fight against each other,
knocking on the walls.”
Bendel also said that
“anybody who has ever seen a gas chamber filled to the height of one and half
metres with corpses will never forget it.” (Ibid.)
Regarding the height of the “gas chambers,” Bendel said on that occasion only
that they “gave the impression that the roof was falling” on the heads of the
victims (ibid.). If the ceiling was one and a half meters high, Bendel could not
have seen that scene because there were no presumed “gas chambers” of that
height. If, on the other hand, the ceiling was much higher, then this heap of
corpses one and a half meters high would not have filled up this room, so it
wouldn’t have been a “gas chamber full of corpses.” But be that as it may,
Bendel’s statement is clearly false.
Although he claims to have served in all four Birkenau crematoria, Bendel
describes the alleged gassing activity only with reference to Crematorium V.
He claims to have joined the Sonderkommando on June 2, 1944. He de-
scribed his first day of work as follows (Krewer et al. 1946, pp. 161f.):
“One day in June 1944, at 6 o’clock in the morning, I join the day shift (150
men) of Crematorium 4. […] It is midday when a long column of women, chil-
dren, old men comes into the yard of the crematorium. These are people from
the Lodz Ghetto.”
During the Belsen Trial, he stated in this regard:
“The first time I started work there was in August, 1944. No one was gassed
on that occasion, but 150 political prisoners, Russians and Poles, were led one
by one to the graves and there they were shot. Two days later, when I was at-
tached to the day group, I saw a gas chamber in action. On that occasion it
was the ghetto at Lodz – 80,000 people were gassed.” (Phillips 1949, p. 131)
Did Bendel start his work in June or in August? This contradiction is difficult
to resolve, because both dates have their logic.
As I pointed out earlier, the first transport from the Lodz Ghetto arrived at
Auschwitz on August 15, 1944, and eight others followed until the end of the
month. Hence, if Bendel’s first day of activity was in August 1944 (exactly
between 15 and 31), what did Bendel do as a member of the Sonderkommando
between June 2 and mid-August? Since this is almost two and a half months,
the question is more than justified. He, the Sonderkommando physician, never
witnessed a “gassing” during this time? If, however, his first day at work was
in June, he could not have seen any transport from the Lodz Ghetto. Here we
have to deal with one of the many false statements by this witness. In addition,
the number of claimed victims – 80,000 – is over the top, as I pointed out ear-
lier.
In August 1944, according to Bendel, 150 Russian and Polish political
prisoners were shot at the pits. The only reference to these nationalities ap-
pearing in the Auschwitz Kalendarium during the month concerned is the
transfer of 750 Polish and Russian prisoners from Birkenau to the Neu-
engamme Camp on August 25 (Czech 1989, p. 862).
Bendel’s statements are therefore false.
His first day at the Sonderkommando unfolded as follows. Bear in mind
that we are talking about Crematorium V (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 162):
“Some hundred meters from the crematorium one sees white smoke emerging.
[…] Finally, we arrive. Everyone is assigned to their work. Having come as a
spectator, I try to satisfy my curiosity. I would like to know the origin of this
smoke. And so, behind the crematorium, I get acquainted with the pits where
some remains of the evening’s convoy were being consumed. A few meters
from there, men are busy around heaps of ashes, busy reducing them into a
very fine powder; that’s all that’s left of the three thousand people who had
passed this way on the previous day.”
During the Belsen Trial, Bendel stated in this regard (Phillips 1949, p. 131):
“I came at seven o'clock in the morning[352] with the others and saw white
smoke still rising from the trenches, which indicated that a whole transport
had been liquidated or finished off during the night. In Crematorium No. 4 the
result which was achieved by burning was apparently not sufficient. The work
was not going on quickly enough, so behind the crematorium they dug three
large trenches 12 metres long and 6 metres wide.”
The only area of the Birkenau Camp from which smoke emanates that can be
seen on aerial photographs taken in 1944 is about 20 meters north of the
northern wall of Crematorium V, hence it makes no sense to say that the
smoke rose “Some hundred meters from the crematorium.”
Only on this occasion did Bendel get “acquainted” with the pits, which
means that until then he was unaware of their existence. This would make
sense only if the scene took place in early June, but in that case, he could not
have seen any convoy coming from the Lodz Ghetto.
The story of crushing the cremation remains had already been put into Ru-
dolf Höss’s mouth of by way of his “first statement”:353
“After cleaning out the pits, the remaining ashes were crushed. This happened
on a cement slab where inmates pulverized the remaining bones with wooden
pounders.”
Where did this alleged crushing occur? David Olère located it inside Cremato-
rium V in a drawing showing two inmates crushing bone residues with wood-
en pestles (Klarsfeld 1989, p. 77). Filip Müller, another prominent member of
the Sonderkommando, placed it near Crematorium V instead, where “Moll had
a concrete surface made of about 60 meters long and 15 wide” (Müller 1979a,
p. 212).
Needless to say, there is no material or documentary trace of this large
concrete surface. But let’s turn back to Bendel’s story. The transport from the
Lodz Ghetto arrived at noon. Its 800-1,000 people undressed in the courtyard
(Krewer et al. 1946, p. 162):
352
At 6 AM according to Krewer et al. 1946, p. 161.
353
NO-1210. The original document, signed by Höss, from which I took the quotation, is located at
the Military Intelligence Museum at Chicksands, UK. In his essay written while in a Krakow pris-
on, Höss wrote: “During the first interrogation they beat me to obtain evidence. I do not know
what is in the transcript, or what I said, even though I signed it, because they gave me liquor and
beat me with a whip. It was too much even for me to bear.” Paskuly 1996, pp. 179f.
“The doors of the Krematorium opened, and they entered the big room which
served as an undressing room in winter.”
In this room, the victims were “packed together like sardines” (ibid.). The
room in question is defined by Piper as an “undressing room” (Auskleide-
raum) and measured 19.84 m × 12.35 m, some 245 square meters (Piper 2000,
p. 168). If 1,000 people entered that room, their density would have been
about seven per square meter. If they were already “packed together” in there,
what would have been the situation if they had entered in two groups of 500
people each of the two 18-square-meter rooms, resulting in a packing density
of almost 28 people per square meter?
Piper does not say that this “undressing room” was used only in winter. It
is unclear why it should not have been used even in summer as well, and why
the victims would then be forced to undress outdoors in the courtyard.
Meanwhile, the Zyklon B was brought (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 162):
“The Red Cross ambulance arrives. Dr Klein, Obersturmführer, gets out. He
is carrying the gas cans.”
However, according to the orthodox narrative, SS Untersturmführer Dr. Fritz
Klein had nothing to do with the delivery of Zyklon B to the crematoria. Pip-
er, in his list of doctors involved in selections and gassings, does not even
mention him.354 Bendel’s lie is probably tied to the fact that Dr. Klein was one
of the defendants at the Belsen Trial, where he had been accused by various
witnesses of having made selections for the “gas chambers.” In his statement
during that trial, Bendel claimed that “a doctor” came from the Red Cross am-
bulance without specifying who he was, but when replying to the question
whether he had ever seen physicians at the crematoria, he replied:
“Yes, Dr. Klein on one occasion when gas was being brought by the Red
Cross ambulance.” (Phillips 1949, p. 133)
Then, Bendel continued, “The doors of the undressing room are opened,” and
the victims “enter the gas chamber” (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 163), or “the door”
opened and the crowd passed directly “into the gas chambers” (Phillips 1949,
p. 132). For Bendel, the victims’ path was linear: courtyard → undressing
room → gas chamber(s). However, the reality was different as shown by
Blueprint No. 2036 of January 11, 1943 (Pressac 1989, p. 399) and to the
modified blueprint presented by Piper (see Document 20). According to this,
access to the great hall of Crematorium V – the alleged undressing room –
was possible either from the furnace room through an air lock (Schleuse), or
from the main entrance through a vestibule (Vorraum). From there, a door of
180 cm × 205 cm led to the “undressing room,” while an opposite door of 100
cm × 205 cm provided access to “gas chamber” no. 4, from which one entered
the other three. It is evident that Bendel knew nothing of any of this.
354
Piper 2000, p. 239; the alphabetical list of names goes from Kitt to König.
Bendel claimed that, in Crematoria IV and V, Zyklon B was inserted into

the “gas chambers” “through small windows in the wall” (NI-11390, p. 2),
which basically agrees with the orthodox narrative (there were eight small
windows located on three separate walls). However, although Bendel claimed
to have been a spectator of the “gassing” he described, he did not make the
slightest mention of the actual introduction of Zyklon B, which would have
encountered insurmountable difficulties (see Mattogno 2015a, pp. 168-170). I
will return later to his claimed details of the “gassing” procedure.
4.2.5. The Number of Victims

Bendel claimed that the number of Auschwitz victims was “More than four
million” (NI-11953, p. 3). During the I.G. Farben Trial, he was asked the fol-
lowing question by a defense lawyer (Bendel 1948, pp. 9600f.):
“But how do you know that 4,000,000 people were gassed in Auschwitz?”
Bendel answered arrogantly:
“First of all, there is the source of the indictment before the International
Military Tribunal. In the second place, my personal experience. In a certain
period of time I witnessed the killing of hundreds of thousands of people who
passed through the gas chambers of the crematoria. No doubt, these people
are not able to testify now. Their ashes are now in the River Vistula.”
In the indictment of said Tribunal we read (IMT, Vol. 1, p. 47):
“About 1,500,000 persons were exterminated in Maidanek [sic] and about
4,000,000 persons were exterminated in Auschwitz, among whom were citizens
of Poland, the U.S.S.R., the United States of America, Great Britain, Czecho-
slovakia, France, and other countries.”
It is well-known that these are propaganda figures which over time have been
drastically reduced by mainstream historiography: by 72.5% in the case of
Auschwitz, and by a whopping 95% in the case of Majdanek! The official
Auschwitz death toll currently stands at about 1,100,000 (Piper 1993, p. 202),
and that of Majdanek at 74,000 (Kranz 2007, pp. 61f.).
On the other hand, and in contrast to this, Bendel defined Birkenau as “the
tomb of hundreds of thousands of victims brought from all over Europe”
(Krewer et al. 1946, p. 160) rather than millions of victims.
As for his “personal experience,” Bendel provided imaginative and con-
flicting data. He affirmed (Bendel 1947, p. 210r):
“The exterminations at the Auschwitz Camp during my stay amount to
800,000-1,000,000.”
“Q. While you were at Birkenau, how many human beings were gassed in the
crematoria?
A. In Birkenau or in the crematoria during the time I was in the crematoria?
Q. During the whole time you were there at Birkenau.

A. About one million.” (NI-11953, p. 1)
He also provided a breakdown of the gassing victims for the months of greater
activity:
“Within 2 and 1/2 months, 450,000 persons died.” (Bendel 1947, p. 210r)
“In May and June [1944] a total of 400,000 people were gassed, and in Au-
gust about 100,000. In Sept. and Oct. the figures dropped to about 15,000 per
month.” (NI-11390, p. 4)
“Q. How many were gassed in May and June 1944?
A. About 400,000.
Q. In August of 1944?
A. From the 15th July to 1st September, 80,000.” (NI-11953, p. 3)
Since Bendel always starts with May, the 450,000 victims “within two and a
half months” refer to those who died from May until mid-July. He claimed
moreover another 80,000 victims from July 15 to September 1, so that the to-
tal number of victims from May to August amounts to 530,000. However, he
also states that there were some 400,000 victims during the months of May
and June, plus 100,000 during August, hence 500,000 victims without July,
which leaves 30,000 victims for that month. On the other hand, if there were
100,000 victims in August, it is not possible that the total for August plus half
of July were 80,000. In further contradiction to this, Bendel asserted (ibid., p.
2):
“During the month of June the number of gassed was 25,000 every day.”
But that figure corresponds to (25,000 × 30 =) 750,000 victims merely for the
month of June! He evidently attributed to the whole month what rumors circu-
lating in the camp attributed to a daily “record.” Bendel paid tribute to this
daily-record rumor himself in his French deposition (Bendel 1947, p. 210r):
“Always thanks to this method, on June 25, 1944, 26,000 bodies disappeared
on that day.”
As mentioned earlier, the “gassing” or cremation “record” was yet another one
of the stereotypes of camp propaganda, which Jan Sehn embraced as well with
some pertinent modifications (1946, p. 126):
“With all installations in full operation, the figure of 24,000 corpses cremated
per day was reached in August 1944!”
Bendel stated moreover (NI-11390, p. 7):
“During the months of May and June of 1944 I estimate that a total of 400 tins
of Zyklon per month were used for killing people.”
According to Bendel, the relationship between the number of Zyklon-B cans
used and the number of “gassing” victims was as follows:
“Two tins for one thousand persons; 25,000 per day; then we may say 50 tins
per day.” (NI-11953, p. 3)
This results in a need for (50 × 30 =) 1,500 cans for one month. Conversely,
400 cans would be enough for (400 ÷ 2 × 1,000 =) 200,000 “gassing” victims.
Ignoring the contradictions pointed out above, Bendel’s statements repre-
sent a maximum of 560,000 victims from May to October 1944. Nevertheless,
Bendel claimed that, during the time of his stay in Birkenau from February 27,
1944 to the evacuation of the camp, a million people were killed. Keep in
mind that he entered the Sonderkommando on June 2, 1944, and that “the
cremation furnaces worked until November 5, 1944” (Bendel 1947, p. 211),
the date when mass exterminations are said to have ceased. For the period
from February 27 to June 1, 1944, he could not have been a “witness” to any
killing in the “gas chambers,” which is why the figure he claims is both con-
tradictory and wrong even from an orthodox point of view. This is, of course,
also true for May, when he was not yet a member of the Sonderkommando: if
we take the only data provided by Bendel – 400 cans of Zyklon B with two
cans per 1,000 victims – this results in 200,000 “gassing” victims for that
month which he cannot possibly have “witnessed,” so that the total of the vic-
tims whom he “witnessed” decreases to some 360,000.
But there are further complications, because the witness also asserted:
“I think the first experiments in gassing were carried out at Auschwitz in May
or June of 1942” (NI-11390, p. 6),
which is in sharp contrast to the current orthodox narrative, according to
which the first experiment took place in September 1941, followed by other
small-scale gassings in Crematorium I of the Auschwitz Main Camp from fall
1941 until fall 1942.
To make things worse, Bendel claimed that
“the first gassings were camed [carried] out at Birkenau at the beginning of
1943.” (ibid., p. 4)
Not putting too much weight on the individual figures Bendel gave, it is safe
to say that he claimed some 530,000 gassing victims for the time starting in
May 1944 until the claimed termination of the extermination program. In or-
der to believe in the four-million-victim story, Bendel must therefore have be-
lieved that from the beginning of 1943 until May 1, 1944 (4,000,000 –
530,000 =) some three and a half million people were killed!
From his many testimonies it is also clear that Bendel had no knowledge of
the activities at the alleged “Bunkers” of Birkenau in the years 1942-1943,
which is at least surprising. As far as 1944 is concerned, it is more appropriate
to examine his statements in parallel with those of Nyiszli, which I will do in
Section 4.2.8.
4.2.6. Dental Gold

Another absurdity offered by Bendel relates to the amount of dental gold ob-
tained from the corpses of the victims. The Germans feigned to despise gold,
but (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 164):
“This did not prevent them from recovering from their victims – between the
launch of the crematoria and the month of November [19]44, the date when
they ceased to operate – seventeen tons of the precious yellow metal.”
He specified that this amount of gold had been extracted from four million
corpses. At the Tesch Trial, the witness stated (NI-11953, p. 3):
“The National Socialist government said they did not care about gold; still
they managed to get 17 tons of gold out of the four million bodies.”
Replying to a specific question by Dr. Zippel, Bendel stated that he referred to
a metric ton (1,000 kg; ibid., p. 4).355 This assertion is nonsensical already for
the fact that it relates to the fairy tale of four million victims. It is also in open
contradiction to the information provided by the Auschwitz camp resistance
referred to earlier, according to which 33.6 kg of gold were extracted from
100,000 corpses. For the phantom-like four million, this would correspond to
1,344 kg or 1.344 metric tons, almost 13 times less than what Bendel indicat-
ed.
4.2.7. Disinfestations with Zyklon B

During the Tesch Trial, the witnesses were cajoled to support the allegation
that all or most of the Zyklon B supplied to Auschwitz was used for mass
murder. The prosecution’s position can be inferred well from, and was the op-
posite of, what Bruno Tesch’s defense lawyer was trying to demonstrate,
namely (United Nations… 1947, Vol. I, p. 96):
“that Tesch had no knowledge of the killing of human beings by means of
Zyklon B; secondly, that Zyklon B was delivered only for normal purposes of
disinfection and for medical reasons; thirdly, that parts of gas chambers were
sold only for the purpose of exterminating vermin;[356] fourthly, that concentra-
tion camps got the gas only in amounts which were quite normal in relation to
the number of inhabitants, and only for killing vermin; and fifthly, that instruc-
tion courses were held only according to the relevant laws and regulations,
355
A U.S. short ton has 2,000 lbs or 907 kg.
356
This refers to the Zyklon-B-disinfestation devices using the Degesch circulation system supplied
by Tesch. These were gas chambers with the standard dimensions of 4 m × 1.35 m × 1.90 m =
about 10 m³. The Americans mistranslated the order for two of these devices submitted to the
Tesch Company by the Gross-Rosen Camp, which is mentioned in a Tesch letter of August 25,
1941, as “delivery of circulation equipment for two extermination chambers of 10 cubic meters
each”! NO-4345, NMT, Vol. V, p. 363. The German text says: “Lieferung der Kreislaufgeräte für
zwei Entwesungskammern [disinfestation chambers] von je 10 cbm.”
and again only for the purpose of teaching the method of exterminating ver-
min.”
The witnesses for the prosecution therefore had to support the exact opposite
in order to refute these five points. Bendel focused on Points 2 and 4, namely
on the alleged use of Zyklon B for the purpose of killing humans, and its al-
legedly disproportionate supply. The latter was already discussed earlier when
dealing with the number of Zyklon-B cans used for the supposed mass exter-
mination.
Regarding Point 2, Bendel stated:357
“At Birkenaw [sic] the disinfesting[358] of clothes was done by boiling them,
there was no disinfestation by gas. I know that disinfesting of clothes at
Auschwitz itself was done by use of a gas chambers [sic] which was also used
for killing people. At Birkenaw the gas used for killing people was prussic ac-
id, also called Zyklon B.”
Any reader of Pressac’s first book on Auschwitz knows that two disinfestation
facilities with shower rooms existed in Birkenau known as BW 5a and 5b,
which each contained a Zyklon B “Gaskammer” (gas chamber). In 1943, the
Zyklon-B disinfestation wing of BW5a was converted into two rooms with hot
air disinfestation (Pressac 1989, pp. 53-62).
Bendel stated that the clothes of those gassed were brought to Auschwitz,
where they were disinfested in a special room (although the interrogation pro-
tocol erroneously states “disinfected”; NI-11953, p. 3):
“Q. How large was the room and how much clothing was in it?
A. It was a very little room. I know it because 200 men of my own Kommando
were gassed in that room.
Q. What quantity of clothing was stored there?
A. Clothing belonging to about five to six hundred people.
Q. When was disinfection of barracks and clothing carried out in that camp?
A. During the whole period from 10th December 1943 until the 18th January
1945 I remember only one disinfection of barracks.”
The last statement was contradicted by Bendel himself:359
“Disinfesting[360] of camp Tzigane, which is the name of one of the compounds
at Birkenaw [sic], was done by Zyklon B also. I remember noticing the same
empty tins after disinfesting as I saw at the crematorium. This disinfesting of
barracks was done every 3 weeks by a special working party of SS. I think they
used 2 or 3 tins of gas for each barrack.”
357
TNA, WO 309-1603.
358
The transcript (NI-11390) reads here erroneously “disinfecting” and later “disinfectation” rather
than “disinfestation.”
359
TNA, WO 309-1603. NI-11390, p. 5.
360
In transcript (NI-11390) “disinfecting.”
Bendel claimed to have personally seen the fumigation of one of these bar-
racks with Zyklon B (Bendel 1948, p. 9599). During the Tesch Trial, he was
asked whether in Auschwitz and Birkenau the disinfestation of clothing and
barracks was carried out by means other than the Zyklon B. He replied (NI-
11953, p. 3):
“A. It was done mainly by Lisoform. […]
A. Mainly by Lisoform. I remember only once having seen it done by gas.”
In this regard, defense lawyer Zippel confronted the witness during cross-
examination, who answered mendaciously and impertinently (ibid., p. 4):
“Q. Is it known to you that Lisoform is a disinfectant only against germs, but
not against insects in clothing?
A. There was no disinfection intended, as these people brought into concentra-
tion camps were not brought there to be disinfected or kept clean or kept
healthy, but to be disposed of.”
Considering that Bendel was a physician, his mendacity becomes evident. He
played on the confusing similarity of the terms disinfection (against bacteria)
versus disinfestation (against pests), and deliberately ignored the many regis-
tered detainees for whom disinfestation was of vital importance for controlling
the typhus epidemics and other infectious diseases.
The fumigation chamber in which 200 men of the Sonderkommando are
said to have been gassed was located in the so-called “Kanada I,” BW 28, the
delousing and effects-storage barracks (Entlausungs- und Effektenbaracken).
Bendel described it as follows:361
“At Auschwitz there was an underground gas chamber which was used princi-
pally for disinfestation purposes. It was about 12 metres long, 10 wide and
about 1 1/2 metres high.”
The photos of this facility published by Pressac clearly show that this fumiga-
tion chamber was not located “underground” but on ground level, and that it
was at least twice as high as Bendel claimed (1989, pp. 41-50, esp. Photos 7, 9
& 13). A “Listing of the disinfestation facilities, baths and disinfection sys-
tems installed in CC and PoW Camp Auschwitz” compiled on July 30, 1943
by civilian employee Rudolf Jährling, which also gives the “daily capacity (24
hrs)” of these devices, informs us that Kanada I had a fumigation chamber
“for some 30,000 pieces of laundry, blankets, etc.” daily, and the chambers of
BW 5a had a “daily capacity of 8,000 blankets.”362 For Bendel, however, the
fumigation chamber of Kanada I had a daily capacity of 500-600 sets of cloth-
ing!
I will return to the issue of the alleged murder of 200 Sonderkommando
members in that fumigation chamber later.
361
TNA, WO 309-1603. In the transcript (NI-11390, p. 6) it is the term “disinfectation.”
362
RGVA, 502-1-332, pp. 9f.
4.2.8. Nyiszli versus Bendel

Nyiszli and Bendel both claimed to have been the physician of the Sonder-
kommando and to have lived in Birkenau crematoria during the same period,
from the beginning of July 1944 to the evacuation of the camp in January
1945. However, in their statements, they ignore each other, which is already a
surprising fact. Since they claim to have been eyewitnesses of the same events
and would have had the same experiences, their testimony should be largely,
if not completely, similar. In this section, I will therefore present a comparison
of their statements with regard to the most important issues.
4.2.8.1. The Crematoria

On the history of the crematoria, I have already elaborated earlier.
Nyiszli claims that Crematoria II and III had 15 single cremation furnaces
with a capacity of 5,000 corpses per day, and that the total capacity of the four
crematoria was 20,000 corpses per day, which indicates that in his eyes even
Crematoria IV and V had 15 furnaces each with a capacity of 5,000 corpses
per day. Bendel speaks of 16 furnaces in Crematoria II and III, with a capacity
of 2,000 corpses a day, of eight furnaces in Crematoria IV and V, with a ca-
pacity of 1,000 corpses per day. The maximum capacity of the plants was
20,000 per day for Nyiszli, 6,000 per Bendel.
According to Nyiszli, killings with the shot of a 6-mm pistol into the back
of the neck were also carried out in Crematorium II. Every night, he claimed,
70 to 80 camp inmates were killed that way (Chapter XXII). Bendel says in-
stead (Bendel 1947, pp. 211, 211r.):
“However, I must point out that every day 150 to 200 Russian or Polish parti-
sans were brought who had been condemned to death, and their execution
consisted of a pistol shot into the back of the neck.”
According to Nyizsli, the gas chambers were moreover only used when there
were more than 500 victims; otherwise they were shot instead (Chapter XX).
Bendel says the limit was 300 (NI-11953, p. 2):
“up to the number of 300 they were shot; above the number they were gassed.”
4.2.8.2. The “Gas Chambers”

Dimensions
Nyiszli carefully describes only Crematorium II. Via 10-12 steps, he descend-
ed into a large room about 200 meters long (the “undressing room”), from
where, through a two-leafed oak door, one got into the “gas chamber,” which
had the same length (Chapter VII). For him, Crematoria II and III had only
one gas chamber.
For Bendel, these crematoria were equipped with two gas chambers each,
the length of which was 10 meters.
Illustration 2: Blueprint of a section of the basement of Crematorium II, Birkenau;

Morgue #2 (L.-KELLER 2) at top left, Morgue #1 (L.-KELLER 1) at bottom; CCO
Blueprint No. 2003, drawn on Dec 19, 1942; PMO Archives, file BW 30/12, neg.
no. 20922/4; Pressac 1989, p. 302.
The length of the alleged gas chamber (Morgue #1) was actually 30 meters,
and that of the alleged undressing room (Morgue #2) was almost 50 meters.
Also, Morgue #2 did not directly lead into the gas chamber, but rather into
a corridor some 5 meters long and 2 meters wide, which led, through a two-
leafed door, into a vestibule (Vorraum), from where, again through a two-
leafed door, one could access Morgue #1, which was arranged perpendicular
to Morgue #2, see the illustration.
Bendel also mentions “massive double-winged oak doors,” but in relation
to Crematorium V (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 163). In that building, however, all
four doors leading into the alleged “gas chambers” had a single-leaf door of
100 cm × 205 cm according to Blueprint #2036.
Capacity
For Nyiszli, 3,000 persons in one single room, for Bendel 2,000 persons dis-
tributed in two rooms.
Method of Introducing Zyklon B
Nyiszli:
“In the center of the room, at a distance of thirty meters from each other, a
number of columns stretch from the concrete floor to the ceiling. These are not
support columns, but are rather quadrangular tinplate pipes, their sides
pierced throughout with holes like a grill.” (Chapter VII)
In D45 he speaks explicitly of “four openings” for the introduction of Zyklon

B.
Bendel (ibid., p. 161):
“At the center of these chambers, two latticed pipes that went down from the
ceiling with an external valve served to emit the gas.”
Nyiszli therefore saw at least four columns, while Bendel saw only two.
Duration of the gassing
For Nyiszli, the victims died either after 2-5 minutes (TVN), within 5 minutes
(Chapter VII) or within 5-10 minutes (D45). A mechanical ventilation fol-
lowed 20 minutes later:
“Twenty minutes later the electric ventilators are switched on to remove the
gas.” (Chapter VII)
Bendel claims the shortest time: 2 minutes. The following statements refer to
Crematorium V:
“For two endless minutes, knocks against the walls are heard, screams that
were no longer human. And then nothing. […] Five minutes later, the doors
are opened.” (ibid., p. 163)
“This [screams and knocks against the walls] went on for two minutes and
then there was complete silence. Five minutes later the doors were opened, but
it was impossible to go in for another twenty minutes.” (Phillips 1949, p. 132)
“For about two minutes one heard screaming and shouting and people knock-
ing against the walls. This was no longer something human to hear. Then
there was deadly silence. Twenty minutes later the doors were reopened.”
(Bendel 1948, p. 9592)
I already noted earlier that, under the conditions described by the witnesses,
execution times of five minutes or less are absurd, since it would have re-
quired the use of gigantic quantities of Zyklon B. Bendel knew nothing about
the mechanical ventilation systems of the alleged “gas chambers” of Cremato-
ria II and III or of the use of gas masks. He mentioned, however, a time of in-
accessibility of twenty minutes with regard to the claimed “gas chambers” of
Crematoria IV and V, which is totally unjustified. Given the structure of these
alleged “gas chambers,” which could be ventilated only by means of natural
draft through merely three doors of 100 cm × 205 cm (one leading into the
vestibule, the others to the outside) and seven tiny windows measuring 30 cm
× 40 cm, access to these rooms without gas masks would have been possible at
best after 20 hours of ventilation, as prescribed by the “Guidelines for the Use
of Prussic Acid (Zyklon) for the Destruction of Vermin (Disinfestation)” (NI-
9912).
The duration of 20 minutes was undoubtedly one of the many factoids that
circulated in the camp.
Number of Victims
Nyiszli states that, during the months of May through July 1944, 550,000
Hungarian Jews were exterminated (LPR). For Bendel, as seen earlier,
450,000 people died within two and a half months starting in May 1944. Since
he claims 400,000 victims for May and June, the two and a half months refer
to the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. (In fact, deportations from Hungary
were carried out from May 14 to July 8.) As for the total figure, Nyiszli re-
peats in his book the tale of four million victims for the entire period the camp
existed:
“Four million innocent people said farewell to their lives here with a last,
painful glance, that they might then descend into their unmourned tomb.”
(Chapter XXXII)
His own experience, what he claims to have seen with his own eyes, however,
amounts to two million instead:
“My eyes followed two million innocent people to the gas chambers, and I was
witness to the horrors of the pyres.” (Epilogue)
Even in his contrived testimony for the I.G. Farben Trial, he wrote that “dur-
ing the period of my imprisonment I was a witness to the death by gas of
about 2 million people” (TVN). As stated earlier, Bendel claimed that during
his stay in the camp some 800,000 to 1,000,000 people died at Auschwitz.
This figure refers to the duration of the witness’s stay at Birkenau, hence from
February 27, 1944 until January 1945, or more precisely until November
1944, when mass exterminations ceased. Nyiszli’s figure pertains to his term
in the Sonderkommando, i.e. from the beginning of July 1944 until November
1944.
Dental Gold
Nyiszli mentions a daily quantity of 30-35 kg of dental gold. Since he claims
that on average 22,000 people were gassed every day (TVN), on average some
1.5 g of gold were extracted from each person. Hence, from the four million
victims, the yield would have been some 6,000 kg, or six metric tons. Bendel
talks about 17 metric tons likewise extracted from four million victims.
The “Bunkers”
As mentioned earlier, Nyiszli knew nothing of “Bunker 2” (or, as it is some-
times called, “Bunker V” or “Bunker 2/V”), the alleged extermination installa-
tion consisting of 4 “gas chambers” which was a few hundred meters west of
the Zentralsauna, outside the camp’s fence. For him, there was only “a long
thatched house” consisting of only one room that served as an “undressing
room” for the victims of shootings at the two outdoor pyres.
In contrast to that, Bendel stated (Bendel 1947, p. 210r):
“From May 15, 1944 on, a new gas chamber was set up outside the camp en-
closure itself. This latter was installed in a farmhouse divided into two parts,
in which the detainees were gassed. From that time on, the bodies coming
from this chamber were no longer cremated in the cremation furnaces, except
in Crematoria I and II [= II and III]. The bodies were placed in gigantic
trenches, in which the cremation took place which was carried out as follows:
among the bodies, gasoline-soaked logs were put in, and the fire was lit.”
“There were four crematoria, the fifth, called Bunker, was nothing but a farm-
house converted into a gas chamber ‘to serve the cause.’” (Krewer et al. 1946,
p. 160)
For Nyiszli, there was therefore a farm cottage with only one room which was
only used as a dressing room; for Bendel, there was a farm cottage with two
rooms serving as “gas chambers.”
Bendel’s hint at the cremation trenches is not very clear. He does not say
where these “gigantic trenches” were, nor how many there were. Furthermore,
his phrase “the bodies coming from this chamber were no longer cremated in
the cremation furnaces” is enigmatic, because “this chamber” should be the
“bunker,” but then it does not make sense to write that, “from that time on”–
meaning May 15, 1944 – the bodies resulting from it were no longer cremated
in the crematoria’s furnaces, because Bendel wrote that before that date “this
chamber” had not yet been set up, so no bodies can have resulted from it prior
to that date. Anyway, Bendel mentioned only three pits of 12 m × 6 m × 1.5 m
located in the courtyard of Crematorium V. While Nyiszli was unaware of the
existence of these pits behind CrematoriumV, Bendel knew nothing about the
existence of the two shooting pits.
Since these are two “eyewitness” testimonies of two people who claim to
have seen the same things in the same place and at the same time, this contra-
diction is irremediable. However, this does not stop orthodox Holocaust
scholars from resolving it with a vulgar trick. J.-C. Pressac himself wrote ge-
nerically, without explicit reference to Nyiszli (1993, p. 91):
“Toward the end of summer, when there was a lack of Zyklon B, inmates unfit
for work of the convoys that were sent to Auschwitz were thrown directly into
the cremation pits of Crematorium V and Bunker 2.”
To back this up, he invoked the following deposition by Hermann Langbein
made during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (Langbein 1965, Vol. 1, p. 88):
“In 1944, living children were thrown into the big fires burning next to the
crematoria. We heard about this in the Main Camp, and I told the garrison
physician about it. Dr. Wirths did not want to believe me. He drove over to
Birkenau in order to check it out. When I went to him for dictation the next
day, he told me: ‘It was an order by camp commander Höss that had been is-
sued because there had no longer been enough gas.’ Since then, Wirths belie-
ved everything I told him.”
Langbein, who later became a famous Auschwitz scholar, was questioned by

the Vienna police on August 8, 1945. In the respective protocol, we read,
among other things:363
“Of course, Grabner was present at the mass gassings of transports that ar-
rived at Auschwitz. In the course of these transports, about 5,000,000 people
were gassed. Grabner was also present at the mass liquidations of the Rus-
sians (during the first winter alone, 1,200,000 of them were killed).”
Langbein also testified during the Krakow trial against the Auschwitz camp
garrison, where he declared during the 11th session:364
“When in the course of these poisonings and gassings the supply of Zyklon B
gas did no longer suffice, Höss gave the order that from then on gassings
would be carried out with the minimum quantity of this gas, as a result of
which some victims merely lost their consciousness during the gassing and
were brought alive to the crematorium. I also know that Höss, due to the lack
of gas, had decreed that there be systems of pyres near the crematoria, and
that children were to be burned alive there, that is, without prior gassing.”
These macabre fables, circulated by the camp’s resistance movement, were
well-known to the detainees, as is evident, for example, by the statements of
two witnesses made during the Nuremberg trial.
At the morning of January 28, 1946, Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier testi-
fied:
“One night we were awakened by terrifying cries. And we discovered, on the
following day, from the men working in the Sonderkomando – the ‘Gas Kom-
mando’ – that on the preceding day, the gas supply having run out, they had
thrown the children into the furnaces alive.” (IMT, Vol. VI, p. 216)
Soon thereafter, on February 27, 1946, her “colleague” Severina Shmag-
levskaya declared:
“At that time, when the greatest number of Jews were exterminated in the gas
chambers, an order was issued that the children were to be thrown into the
crematory ovens or the crematory ditches without previous asphyxiation with
gas.” (IMT, Vol. VIII, p. 319)
Already in 1945, a first testimony on that theme had been published in a pam-
phlet (Vaillant-Couturier 1945, pp. 20f.):
“The line of grandmothers walking in small steps, mothers pushing strollers,
12-year-old children holding the hands of even smaller children, were headed
slowly toward a red brick building that had the inscription ‘Baths.’ There they
undressed, then they were locked up completely naked in a large hall, and gas
capsules were thrown through an opening in the ceiling. It was the same gas
as the one used for disinfection of the blocks against lice. Apparently, five
363
GARF, 7021-108-34, p. 22.
364
AGK, NTN, 110, pp. 1206f.
minutes had to be reckoned for women and three for men. Three quarters of an
hour after the arrival of the train, huge flames were seen coming out of the
cremation furnaces’ chimneys. We knew that the people we had seen alive a
short while earlier would be nothing but a little bit of ashes within a few
minutes. Since the eight cremation furnaces were not enough for the job, the
SS had large pits dug that were filled with dried branches soaked in a flamma-
ble liquid. It is in there where they tossed the corpses. The entire sky was illu-
minated by it. At a certain time, gas was missing, then they threw living chil-
dren into the pits.”
This is a beautiful collection of propaganda fables on which there is no need
to dwell.
4.2.8.3. The “Sonderkommando”

The most striking contradictions between Nyiszli’s and Bendel’s story relate
to the Sonderkommando. It should be noted first that, according to the chro-
nology of his book, Nyiszli was assigned to the Sonderkommando in early
June, which is also when Bendel claims to have been assigned to it. However,
Nyiszli claims that his Sonderkommando was the twelfth in succession – the
previous eleven ones allegedly having been killed to eliminate unwanted wit-
nesses (see Chapters VI, XI, XIXf., XXVIII, XXIXf.), while Bendel claims
that his was only the third (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 160):
“The Sonder[kommando] I was part of was the third with this name, the other
two having been executed at intervals of a few months.”
However, Bendel has also told the tale of the Sonderkommandos’ periodic
elimination after a few months (for Nyiszli every four months).
For Nyiszli, the Sonderkommando consisted of 860 inmates and 120 SS
men, while there were 900 inmates and three SS men in each crematorium ac-
cording to Bendel, but “without taking into account the guards” (ibid.), which
is similar to Nyiszli’s affirmation:
“In each crematorium the watch consists of three men.” (Chapter XXIX)
The strength of the Sonderkommando adduced by the two witnesses, though
slightly different, can be considered more or less accurate because, according
to authentic wartime documents, it varied over time. On July 28, 1944, it con-
sisted of 900 detainees and remained so until 9 August. On August 10, it
dropped to 894, and the next day further down to 870. This figure remained
unchanged until August 31, and is also reflected in the report dated September
7 (Mattogno 2016b, pp. 141-150).
The starkest contradiction between the two testimonies concerns the Son-
derkommando revolt and its final outcome. Bendel reported about it in great
length as follows (Phillips 1949, pp. 133f.):
“– Do you remember 7th October, 1944?
– Yes, it was the day when 500 of these Special Kommandos should have been
going away because they were told to work somewhere else, but it was clear
enough to us that they were going to their death. They did not want to go
away. On that day 100 from this Special Kommando in Crematorium No. 1 [II]
and 400 in Crematorium No. 3 [IV]. were killed. In No. 3 they were killed one
by one with a fatal shot in their neck from a gun. The other hundred were put
in rows in lines of five and one single S.S. man passed by and gave them a shot
in the neck. Kramer was Kommandant of the camp at the time and was present
at these killings.
– Do you remember an occasion when four girls were hanged?
– Yes, in the women’s compound in Auschwitz in Decembre, 1944. They were
accused of passing on dynamite to us for the purpose of exploding the whole
crematorium. They were working in a munition factory called ‘Union’ It was a
public hanging ordered by Hoessler, who was Lagerführer at Auschwitz. […]
– On 7th October, 1944, is not true that the crematorium was set on fire?
– We set fire to Crematorium No. 3. Five hundred people took part in this re-
volt. They had firearms in Crematorium No. 1, but because of a misunder-
standing they could not be used, for the people of No. 1 Crematorium saw No.
3 burning too late.
– Do you know who was the Kommandant of the whole of Auschwitz on 7th
October, 1944?
– I could not say.
– You said that a number of people from the Sonderkommando were shot. Was
there any senior S.S. officier present?
– There were a number of S.S. present during these killings. A whole company
of S.S. came specially from Auschwitz. I do not know about senior ranks, but
the main killer was Rottenführer Barowski. […]
– Were these explosives used during the attempted escape?
– No.”
Bendel carefully described this event in his subsequent statements:
“Of these 900 men, 200 were gassed on September 27, 1944. 500 were execut-
ed with a pistol shot into the back of the neck in front of my own eyes during a
revolt unique in the annals of the concentration camp, which took place on
October 7, 1944. […] Seeing that sooner or later we would have suffered the
fate of the wretches who had been exterminated, we had decided at Cremato-
rium 4 to revolt. On October 8, at noon, 300 of us had to go to Gleiwitz on or-
der of the Germans. We knew that, after the example of the 200 had been set,
this was in fact about a new extermination. Then we attacked about twenty SS
men who carried the lists. We did not know that there was a reinforcement
company nearby. After we set the cremation furnace on fire, this company en-
circled us and reduced us to helplessness before the other detainees which
were in the other crematoria had time to come to our rescue, as had been
planned. As I have already told you, 500 men were executed with a pistol shot
into the back of the neck, and I myself with my colleague, we poisoned our-
selves. I was saved by the head of the crematorium, who carried me to the
hospital together with my colleague, who unfortunately did not survive. We
poisoned ourselves to prevent giving the Germans the pleasure to indulge
themselves in stripping the poor wretches they made to lie on the ground, and
killing them in the manner known to you. This brutal suppression was carried
out by the aforementioned Hess [sic] and Kramer, who on their orders had a
company of SS men from Auschwitz I and Birkenau. […]
The cremation furnaces operated until November 5, 1944 with the 200 survi-
vors of the Sonderkommando. On this date, these 200 men were employed in
the destruction of these furnaces, the Germans not wanting to leave traces be-
hind. This destruction took place until November 27, when we were brought
back to the Birkenau Camp. In this camp, we were locked up in a block. Thirty
of us were sent to Crematorium 4, which had not been destroyed, to incinerate
the corpses of those who had died a natural death. The next day, 100 left for
an unknown destination, and we lost all traces of them. The remaining 70 were
used to destroy with dynamite the reinforced concrete foundation of the crema-
tion furnaces. On January 18, 1945, the evacuation of Birkenau and Auschwitz
took place. Towards this date, the Germans locked us up in a block, certainly
with the intention of destroying us. The hectic pace of the departure certainly
did not allow them to carry out their project. During our transfer to the
Mathausen Camp [Mauthausen], some thirty people tried to escape. They were
killed on the spot. Upon arriving at the camp, those who had been part of the
Sonderkommando were ordered to present themselves immediately. Some
obeyed this order (about a dozen), who were taken away, and we never heard
of them again. The rest was scattered among the other detainees, and I know
that some twenty died of exhaustion during our stay at the Ebensee Camp.”
(Bendel 1947, pp. 210r, 211)
The killing of 200 Sonderkommando members on September 27, 1944 alleged
by Bendel was completely unknown to Nyiszli. Bendel, as we have seen earli-
er, claimed that there was “an underground [fumigation] gas chamber” in
Auschwitz and explicitly stated (NI-11390, p. 6):
“I know that on 27th Sept. 1944 200 men from the special prisoners’ squad
which worked in the crematorium at Birkenau were taken to Auschwitz and
gassed there. Then their bodies were brought back to Birkenau and burned
there.”
However, at that point in time, the only gas chambers in existence at the
Auschwitz Main Camp were fumigation chambers for clothes.
Pressac considered a similar statement by Henryk Tauber as “impossible,”
because the Sonderkommando men, who are said to have been very familiar
with the alleged homicidal “gas chambers” at Birkenau, never would have en-
tered such a “gas chamber” voluntarily. Pressac concluded (1989, p. 498):
“This execution by gassing still remains to be proved.”
Pressac overlooked an even more important argument. He himself reported the

testimony of a prisoner who had worked in the fumigation chamber at the
Main Camp, at the so-called Kanada I clothes-storage area. This inmate, Josef
Odi, described the gassing procedure as follows (1989, p. 41):
“Two prisoners put on gas masks and then went into the middle of the cham-
ber with cans of Zyklon-B. One prisoner stood near the entrance and watched
to see that the two prisoners in the middle of the room didn’t poison them-
selves. Using special chisels, the two men opened the cans of Zyklon-B, poured
it on the floor and withdrew rapidly, closing the gas-tight doors behind them.”
(Emphasis in original)
This would inevitably also have been the procedure for executing the 200
Sonderkommando men with Zyklon-B gas in that chamber, because that fumi-
gation chamber had no windows or openings for introducing Zyklon B from
the outside. Can anyone seriously believe that these men would have allowed
any SS man to enter the gas chamber, open up some Zyklon-B cans, and
spread their contents on the floor without reacting?
Czech gives an earlier date for this event – September 23, 1944 – but does
not explicitly mention the fumigation chamber of Kanada I. She states that the
200 members of the Sonderkommando were taken to the Auschwitz Main
Camp “and are led to a not-very-large building in which clothing items and
other goods are disinfected.” They were made drunk, and then “Zyklon B is
thrown in through a window, which kills them” (1989, pp. 886f.). This cannot
refer to the Kanada I fumigation chamber, since it did not have any windows.
While the Sonderkommando initially had some 900 members, Bendel gives
a number of 700 for October 7, 1944, while Nyiszli still has 860 members on
October 6. Of these, 853 died before the evacuation of the Auschwitz Camp
(as did 70 SS men), so that only seven members stayed alive: Nyiszli and his
three assistants, an engineer, a chief stoker and a “Pipel.”
Bendel testified instead that of the 700 Sonderkommando members, 500
were killed and 200 remained alive until the evacuation of the Auschwitz
Camp. He also claimed that the commander of the Birkenau Camp, Josef
Kramer, whom Nyiszli never mentioned, was present during the executions.
On the other hand, Bendel knows nothing of the escape of twelve Sonderkom-
mando men during the revolt, who were caught again later (Chapter XXIX).
The alleged shooter, Rottenführer Barowski, is an unknown character in or-
thodox Holocaust historiography.
Bendel said that neither the firearms nor the explosives smuggled into
Crematorium II were used during the uprising. Nyiszli in his book asserted the
exact opposite:
“The Sonderkommando has seized control of Crematorium I; it is shooting
and launching hand grenades at the lines of SS mustering before the gate. […]
A terrible explosion follows. Seven SS lie in their own blood, wounded or
dead, the commander among them. The bottle was filled with ecrasite.” (Chap-
ter XXIX)
For Bendel, the cremation furnaces worked until November 5, 1944, operated
by the 200 survivors of the Sonderkommando; for Nyiszli, after the extermina-
tion of the 12th Sonderkommando, a 13th was established, which initially con-
sisted of 30 detainees, but was later increased to 460. The furnaces worked un-
til November 16, because on the 17th came the order stop the killings. On that
same day, the 13th Sonderkommando was eliminated, all except Nyiszli and
his three assistants, that is.
If we follow Bendel instead, the 200 remaining Sonderkommando mem-
bers began dismantling the crematoria on November 5, which they did until
November 27, although Czech wrote that the preliminary work (dismantling
of the technical equipment inside Crematorium II) began only on November
25 (1989, p. 933).
On November 27, Bendel was locked up with his comrades in a block,
where he remained until January 18, 1945. Nyiszli, on the other hand, spent
the last days at Auschwitz inside Crematorium V.
Next, both were evacuated to Mauthausen. Here the anecdote of the SS
soldiers walking among the detainees asking those to step forward who had
been part of the Sonderkommando turns naive, if not to say fatuous: for Ben-
del, as quoted earlier, “Some obeyed this order (about a dozen).” These volun-
teer inmates must have been either demented or suicidal. Bendel mentioned
the Ebensee Camp, and he evidently was also transferred there, just like
Nyiszli, but the two did not meet, or at least they didn’t mention it. Seen from
their point of view, this is quite improbable, because both claimed to have
been the only Sonderkommando physician who had been saved.
Bendel and his colleague (“avec mon collègue”) – here he forgot that he
had claimed to have had two colleagues: “We were three doctors assigned to
this task” (Krewer et al. 1946, p. 159) – who poisoned themselves, although
Bendel was saved by the crematorium Kapo, who took him to the hospital.
Bendel’s colleague died, so he was the only surviving physician (Bendel 1948,
p. 9589):
“Q. And were you the only surviving of the doctors?
A. Yes, unfortunately.”
However, Nyiszli also claimed to have been the only surviving Sonderkom-
mando physician, indeed the only one of the entire Sonderkommando! He had
not poison himself but was saved by Dr. Mengele instead.
As we can see, the two so-called Sonderkommando physicians, who were
assigned to this position only a few days apart from each other, who remained
there until the evacuation of the camp, who saw the same places and wit-
nessed the same events during same period of time, gave accounts of their al-
leged experiences which mutually contradict each other totally and insur-
mountably, and both are riddled with absurdities and blatant lies.
4.3. Gassings and Cremations at the Auschwitz Camp

4.3.1. The Defendants’ Knowledge during the I.G. Farben Trial
As explained earlier, Nyiszli was summoned to the I.G. Farben Trial, but was
not allowed to testify during the hearing. Given the extraordinary importance
that was later attributed to his book, this fact is very strange. Provan’s expla-
nation that Nyiszli “was not called to the stand, presumably because he was
only at Monowitz for about two weeks, and could provide little in the way of
useful evidence” (Provan 2001, p. 29), is inconsistent for a simple reason: the
prosecution also wanted to show that the IG-Farben Trust, as a 42.5% share-
holder of the Degesch Company occupying five out of eleven positions on its
board of directors, was responsible for the production and distribution of
Zyklon B, which, according to the indictment, was used in Auschwitz for ex-
terminations, and that the defendants were aware of that claimed fact. The
prosecution’s Documents Books contain the documents upon which the charg-
es are based. On the one hand, they show perfectly what the prosecution’s
strategy was, and on the other hand, with what documents they were trying to
prove their accusations.
Book No. 82365 summarizes the extermination charge as follows. The senten-
ces underlined by me relate to propaganda themes that have long since been
abandoned by the Holocaust orthodoxy:366
“The Auschwitz concentration camp was established for the main purpose of
exterminating human beings. Life or death of the inmates depended solely up-
on their fitness for work. All who were considered fit to work were used as
slave laborers; all who were not considered fit to work were exterminated in
gas chambers and their bodies burned.
When the remainder of dead exceeded the the capacity of the specially con-
structed crematoria, the ‘overflow’ of human beings was burned in huge open
bonfires. Here many victims were also burned alive. In Auschwitz alone, three
to four million persons were exterminated, and another one-half million died
from disease and starvation.
The decision between life and death of newly arrived inmates was made pur-
suant to a screening system which operated as follows: There were two SS
doctors on duty to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prison-
ers would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as
they walked by. Those who appeared fit for work were sent into the camp.
Others were sent immediately to the extermination chambers. Children of ten-
365
Books 82, 83 and 89 which I examine in this chapter are reproduced in: National Archives Micro-
film Publications, Microfilm Publication M892, Roll 45.
366
Index to Document Book 82. I.G. Farben Case - Count III/C, p. 1.
der years were usually exterminated, since by the reason of their youth, most
of them were considered unable to work. Steps were taken to conceal from the
victims the fact that they were to be exterminated and it was represented to
them that by going through the gas chambers they were only going through a
bathing and delousing process. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the
people in the death chamber, and when their screaming had stopped it was as-
sumed they were dead. About a half hour later the doors were opened and the
bodies removed, whereupon special commandos of the SS took off the rings
and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses. The bodies were then
cremated and after cremation, their ashes were used as fertilizer. In some in-
stances, attempts were made to utilize the fat from the bodies of the victims in
the commercial manufacture of soap.”
This framework of the indictment was based on very few documents, which
are summarized in the index with more or less emphasis depending on the im-
portance attributed to them by the prosecution:
– NI-12207. The indictment of the Tesch Trial,367 which I have dealt with
earlier.
– NI-034. The affidative by Rudolf Höss of May 20, 1946:368
“Affidavit of Rudolf Hoess, SS Commandant at concentration camp Auschwitz.
‘I was commandant of Auschwitz until 1 Dec. 1943 and I estimate that at least
2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there in gas chambers and
crematories […]
Mass executions in gas chambers began during summer 1941 and lasted until
fall 1944. I supervised personally the executions in Auschwitz until 1 Dec.
1943. After I had constructed the extermination buildings in Auschwitz, I used
Cyclon B, a crystallized prussic acid, which was thrown into the death cham-
bers through a small opening. […]
I assume with certainty that this firm knew the purpose of the use of Cyclon B
delivered by it. This they would have to conclude from the fact that the gas for
Auschwitz had been ordered continually and in great quantities, while for the
other departments[369] of SS troops, etc. orders were placed only once or in 6
month intervals. I cannot recall the exact quantities of Cyclon B which we re-
ceived from Tesch and Stabenow; however I estimate at least 10,000 cans, that
is, 10,000 kilos had been supplied by them in the course of 3 years. This figure
is arrived at by computing the number of 2 1/2 million gassed people and the
consumption of an average of 6 cans for every 1500 people.’”
Here the propagandistic claims that have ended in the dustbins of history are
of the death-toll figure of two and a half million gassing victims, of the begin-
ning of mass exterminations in the summer of 1941, and of hydrogen cyanide
367
Document Book 82. I.G. Farben Case - Count III/C, p. 1, pp. 1-30.
368
Ibid., pp. 31-40; the extracts quoted are from the first three pages.
369
Curiously, here and in the German text the English term “departments” appears instead of the
most-obvious German term “Abteilungen.”
“crystals.” The introduction of the Zyklon B occurred through “a small open-

ing” – just one! – and the amount Höss “calculated” is only half the amount
which Alfred Zaun, Tesch & Stabenow’s accountant, gave for the years 1942
and 1943 alone: 19,653.5 kg (Affidavit, Oct. 26, 1945, NI-11396). The calcu-
lation method is clearly made-up. The “dosage” of Zyklon B is also in contra-
diction to Bendel’s statement: 2 kg for 1,000 people, or 3 kg for 1,500 people.
– NO-2368 [NI-6190]: The statement by Friedrich Entress of April 14, 1947:
“Affidavit of Friedrich Entress, SS doctor at concentration camp Auschwitz.
‘Two old farm buildings were used as the first gas chambers; these buildings
had been specially reconstructed for the gassing. This reconstruction was car-
ried out by the SS Construction Office. The windows were bricked up, the par-
titioning walls taken out and a special door put in, which shut the chamber
airtight. The space was made to hold three hundred persons. The prisoners
had to undress in a barrack situated next to the gas chamber and were then
taken into the gas chamber. After the doors were closed, the gas (Zyklon B)
was thrown by three SS men through slits which could be shut, into the gas
chambers.’[370]
‘The new crematoria were built in such a manner that the complete process of
liquidation could take place in one building. The prisoners were first taken to
the dressing rooms and then to the gas chambers. The new gas chambers had
properly constructed chutes [‘Schächte,’ shafts] through which the gas was let
in and a modern ventilation system [‘Entlüftungsanlage,’ air-extraction sys-
tem]. Adjacent to the gas chambers [‘anschliessend an die Gaskammer,’ adja-
cent to the gas chamber] the crematoria [‘Verbrennungsöfen,’ cremation fur-
naces] were situated, so that the crematoria [‘Crematorien’] could carry out
the liquidation of the prisoners in an assembly line manner (Laufendes
Band).’”
The poor Dr. Entress knew nothing about the alleged extermination and tried
to cobble together a story – and a bad one at this – using the little “informa-
tion” he had learned during his imprisonment.
He had no idea that the two “farmhouses”, according to the claimed SS
jargon, were to be called “Bunkers.” He claims that they had been remodeled
by the Auschwitz Construction Office, but there is not the slightest documen-
tary trace about them. The mainstream narrative has it that these buildings had
two (Bunker 1) or even four gas chambers (Bunker 2), but for Dr. Entress
their internal walls had been torn down to get one single room. They are said
to have had two and eight doors, respectively, but for Entress there was only
one. According to camp commander Höss, their capacity was 800 and 1,200
people, respectively, but just 300 for Entress. Only one barracks next to the
gas chamber was used as an undressing room according to him, but star wit-
370
In German: “Zyklon B”; “durch verschliessbare Öffnungen in die Gaskammer”, “through closeab-
le openings into the gas chamber.”
ness Szlama Dragon spoke of two barracks located 500 meters from “gas
chamber no. 1” and two more some 150 meters from the “gas chamber no. 2”
(see Mattogno 2016a, p. 74).
Entress had quite some recollections about the crematoria as well: the
openings for introducing Zyklon B were “shafts,” of which he evidently knew
neither the number nor the positions. A de-aeration system he claimed for the
gas chamber existed only in “Morgue #2” (the supposed undressing room) of
Crematoria II and III, while “Morgue #1” (the alleged “gas chamber”) had
both an areation and a de-aeration system, that is to say, two fans, one to draw
in air, the other one to expel it. Finally, the cremation furnaces were not di-
rectly adjacent to the “gas chambers” in any of the Birkenau crematoria.
– NI-11957. Affidavit by R. Diels of October 5, 1945.371 The witness stated
that the use of gas for extermination was known to everyone in Germany,
and that in particular the IG-Farben executives were aware of it.
– NI-11954. The testimony by Perry [sic] Broad during the Tesch Trial on
March 2, 1945 (pp. 50-62):
“Q. What was the name of the gas on the tins which you saw in Auschwitz?
A. Zyklon B.
Q. At a rough estimate, what was the total number of people exterminated by
gas while you were at Auschwitz and Birkenau?
A. I would think 2,500,000 to 3,000,000.
Q. Who were these people who were being gassed?
A. There were German deportees, then Jews from Belgium, Holland, France,
the northern part of Italy, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
Q. How many people could be put into the crematoriums in any one opera-
tion? ...
A. In crematoriums 1 and 2, 3000 to 4000; in crematoriums 3 and 4, 2000; in
5 there was only a gas stove there – 800 to 1200”
These insane statements need no further comment.
– NI-11710. This is the famous affidavit by Nyiszli (pp. 63-66) that was
summarized with the following few lines:
“Affidavit by Dr. Nikolae [sic] (a physician detained in Auschwitz). The wit-
ness describes the gassing of human beings with Cyclon B at Auschwitz-
Birkenau. Describes in detail the extermination process by means of gassing
human beings, including the method, results and medical diagnosis.”
The excerpts of the documents in the index served the public prosecutor’s of-
fice to quickly and easily adduce the passages considered most significant.
There was no excerpt for Nyiszli’s affidavit, but only a brief summary, which
indicates that this document was not considered of particular importance.
371
Document Book 82. I.G. Farben Case - Count III/C, p. 1, pp. 46-48; subsequent page numbers
from there unless stated otherwise.
– NI-11862. The affidavit by Heinrich Schuster of October 13, 1947 (pp. 67-
73). Even in this case there is a brief summary:
“Affidavit of Heinrich Schuster (medical orderly and inmate of concentration
camp Auschwitz). Describes use of Cyclon B gas at Auschwitz, knowledge of
civilian population about gassing, and provides figures on quantity of Cyclon
B gas needed for disinfection.”
The declaration contains well-known propaganda themes:
“The gas chambers in the crematoria were operated by a detachment of about
800-1,000 of the strongest inmates, selected personally by SS-Oberscharfueh-
rer Moll, chief of this department. They were strictly isolated from the other
inmates of the camp and billeted in the crematoria. In the course of time, the
whole detachment was often liquidated on their way through the gas chamber.
Only one French doctor, who was with this detachment, remained alive. I got
to know him better in October 1943 at Birkenau. When he came to pick up
medicaments, he told me of his gruesome observations. I also learned from
him that Cyklon B was used in the crematoria in the gas chambers serving the
gassing of human beings.”
According to one version of the tales of the time, which also appears in the
account by Robert Lévy, the “French physician” was Dr. Bendel. It is not pos-
sible that Schuster knew him in Birkenau in October 1943, since Bendel was
deported to Auschwitz only on December 10, 1943.
With regard to the alleged mass extermination in 1944, this witness’s tale
was pretty similar to that related by Nyiszli, apart from the numbers:
“From April 1944 until about mid-October 1944 the mass extermination took
on such proportions (from 15 April on 3 - 4 trains with 50 cars each, crammed
with people, arrived daily) that all 4 crematoria [together] were not large
enough to burn the human beings who had already been gassed. Near crema-
toria III and IV, therefore, 2 gigantic funeral pyres were erected, on which
mountains of gassed inmates were burned the whole time. The fire and smoke
could be seen 20 kilometres away.”
Notice the position of the two pyres and his ignorance of “Bunker 2” and its
cremation pits. Finally, I report the following sentence only for curiosity’s
sake:
“About 150,000 Hungarian Jewesses were quartered in BIIb and BIIc, as well
as BIII.”
– PS-3868. The affidavit by Rudolf Höss of April 5, 1946 (pp. 76-78). Of
this document, the index extracted the following passages:
“Affidavit by Rudolf Höss, SS commandant of the Auschwitz Camp.
‘The ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination
of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at
Auschwitz in June 1941.’
‘The Camp Commandant at Tremblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000

[persons] in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with
liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I
did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the exter-
mination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized
Prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening.’
‘Another improvement we made over Tremblinka was that we built our gas
chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Tremblinka
their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each.’”
It is nowadays an established fact that this tale is an accumulation of absurdi-
ties, beginning with the alleged extermination order of June 1941. This dating
is so foolish that even the Holocaust orthodoxy had to admit it eventually
(Orth 1999). Höss’s visit to Treblinka would have taken place prior to the start
of mass exterminations at Auschwitz, hence “Probably it was in September
1941, but it may not have been until January 1942” (Bezwińska/Czech 1984,
p. 114), while the Treblinka camp was opened only in July 1942. Höss even
claimed that 80,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto had already been murdered
in Treblinka before his alleged visit there in September 1941 or January 1942,
although the deportation of Jews from that ghetto didn’t start until July 1942!
The affidavit in question was written in English and was simply signed by
Höss.372 It fully reflects the poor knowledge of Höss’s British interrogators at
that time. This explains the extreme vagueness of the description: “the exter-
mination building,” the “crystallized Prussic acid,” the “death chamber,” the
“small opening,” the capacity of 2,000 people in “our gas chambers.” When
Höss was extradited to Poland, he managed to “benefit” from the Polish inter-
rogators’ far more detailed “knowledge” about Auschwitz, hence his tales lost
their British nebulosity.373
Further documents on the alleged extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz
can be found in Document Book No. 83 and 89. The first contains Document
NI-11953, which is Dr. Bendel’s deposition of March 2, 1946 during the
Tesch Trial,374 which I discussed earlier.
Last but not least, Document Book No. 89 contains Document L-22,375 the
report published in November 1944 by the War Refugee Board Report, con-
sisting of the statements by five detainees who had escaped from Birkenau:
Walter Rosenberg, who later assumed the name Rudolf Vrba, Alfred Wetzler
(April 7, 1944), Czesław Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin (May 27, 1944), as
well as Jerzy Wesolowski, alias Tabeau, known as a “Polish major” (Novem-
ber 19, 1943).
372
Reproduction of the original in: Mattogno 2017, Document 10, pp. 370-372.
373
On the contents, background and historicity of Höss’s various post-war statements see Mattogno
2017.
374
Document Book 83. I.G. Farben Case VI Count III/B, pp. 154-164.
375
Document Book 89. I.G. Farben Case VI, Count III, pp. 150-264.
The document is summarized as follows:376

“The reports give figures concerning the size of the different transports which
arrived in the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, with a breakdown
according to nationalities and origin. The ‘selections’ for the gas chambers
are described in detail as well as the actual gassing procedure with ‘Zyklon.’
It is mentioned that at the inauguration of the first crematorium in Mar. 1943
prominent guests from Berlin, both officers and civilians, were present and
were shown through a special peephole in the gas chamber a ‘program’ con-
sisting of gassing 8,000 Cracow Jews. Many details, e.g., concerning the camp
hospitals, the work of concentration camp inmates for private industries,
rough sketches of the camps and gas chambers give an all-around information
to the public concerning the conditions in the two extermination camps.”
Alfred Wetzler’s report notoriously contains a detailed description of the al-
leged extermination facilities and procedures at Birkenau. I quote the passage
concerning the inauguration of the first Birkenau crematorium:377
“At the end of February, 1943 a new modern crematorium and gassing plant
was inaugurated at BIRKENAU. […]
Prominent guests from BERLIN were present at the inauguration of the first
crematorium in March, 1943. The ‘program’ consisted of the gassing and
burning of 8,000 Cracow Jews. The guests, both officers and civilians, were
extremely satisfied with the results and the special peephole fitted into the
door of the gas chamber was in constant use. They were lavish in their praise
of this newly erected installation.”
Leaving aside the contradiction regarding the inauguration month, the visit of
important guests from Berlin is a fairy tale invented to give an irrelevant event
of German history national importance: the “first crematorium” of Auschwitz-
Birkenau was so significant for all of Germany and the Reich’s government
that eminent military and civilian personalities form Berlin were brought in to
attend its inauguration! There is, of course, no trace of this in the documents.
As for the Jews of Krakow, according to Czech, the number of those allegedly
gassed during that inauguration was not 8,000, but 1,492, as stated earlier.
Due to its claimed accuracy, Wetzler’s description of the crematoria and
“gas chambers” was a central element of the indictment during the I.G. Farben
Trial:378
“At present there are four crematoria in operation at BIRKENAU, two large
ones, I and II, and two smaller ones, III and IV. Those of type I and II consist
of 3 parts, i.e.: (A) the furnace room; (B) the large hall; and (C) the gas
376
Ibid., p. 6.
377
From the original text: “The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Birkenau in Up-
per Silesia.” FDRL, WRB, Box No. 6, pp. 12f.
378
Ibid., p. 13.
chamber. A huge chimney rises from the furnace room around which are
grouped nine furnaces, each having four openings.
Each opening can take three normal corpses at once and after an hour and a
half the bodies are completely burned. This corresponds to a daily capacity of
about 2,000 bodies. Next to this is a large ‘reception hall’ which is arranged
so as to give the impression of the antechamber of a bathing establishment. It
holds 2,000 people and apparently there is a similar waiting room on the floor
below. From there a door and a few steps lead down into the very long and
narrow gas chamber. The walls of this chamber are also camouflaged with
simulated entries to shower rooms in order to mislead the victims.
This roof is fitted with three traps which can be hermetically closed from the
outside. A track leads from the gas chamber to the furnace room. The gassing
takes place as follows: the unfortunate victims are brought into hall (B) where
they are told to undress. To complete the fiction that they are going to bathe,
each person receives a towel and a small piece of soap issued by two men clad
in white coats. They are then crowded into the gas chamber (C) in such num-
bers there is, of course, only standing room.
To compress this crowd into the narrow space, shots are often fired to induce
those already at the far end to huddle still closer together. When everybody is
inside, the heavy doors are closed. Then there is a short pause, presumably to
allow the room temperature to rise to a certain level, after which SS men with
gas masks climb on the roof, open the traps, and shake down a preparation in
powder form out of tin cans labeled ‘CYKLON’ ‘For use against vermin,’
which is manufactured by a Hamburg concern.
It is presumed that this is a ‘CYANIDE’ mixture of some sort which turns into
gas at a certain temperature. After three minutes everyone in the chamber is
dead. No one is known to have survived this ordeal, although it was not un-
common to discover signs of life after the primitive measures employed in the
Birch Wood.
The chamber is then opened, aired, and the ‘special squad’ carts the bodies on
flat trucks to the furnace rooms where the burning takes place. Crematoria III
and IV work on nearly the same principle, but their capacity is only half as
large. Thus the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at
BIRKENAU amounts to about 6,000 daily.”
This description contradicts what Nyiszli had described in his book. What
Nyiszli wrote there is also in sharp contrast to all the other, more important
testimonies as collected in the case files, i.e., those by R. Höss, F. Entress, P.
Broad and C.S. Bendel. This is most likely the reason why prosecutor
Minskoff declined to have Nyiszli testify during the trial. This very rejection
probably led Nyiszli, as a sort of childish revenge, to invent his own trial dep-
osition which, however, never happened. One can certainly believe Nyiszli
when he claims that he had brought a copy of his book to Nuremberg, but ap-
parently it had the exact opposite effect of what he claimed:
“The prosecutor lifted a copy of my book from his desk.

‘In that regard, the doctor’s statement is also important because he put it in
writing in a 1946 volume, thus submitting his experiences. We requested this
copy from the author. Our experts have examined its data and, having com-
pared them with the documents available during this trial for the past two
years, regard it as documentary material because with its description it has
shed light on hitherto still rather unknown details.’” (TVN)
Nyiszli’s book was undoubtedly examined, but was found to be totally dis-
cordant with the material already collected by the prosecution, so it was not
taken into account in any way, and Nyiszli was not admitted as a witness. His
claim that the active ingredient in Zyklon B was chlorine, and the description
of the invented gassing scenario based on this false assumption certainly did
not make him trustworthy in the eyes of those who had extensive technical
documentation of prime quality on Zyklon B.
Wetzler’s report was a first attempt to put some order in the multifaceted
and contrasting propaganda claims about the crematoria and “gas chambers”
created by the resistance movement at Auschwitz, which consisted of various
groups – Polish, French, Belgian, Russian, German, Czech, Slovakian, Yugo-
slavian – each of which had its own headquarters inventing and disseminating
fake news.
In many regards, the narration contained in Wetzler’s report is even more
nonsensical than Nyiszli’s. I limit myself to some essential observations.
According to the actual blueprints of the crematoria:
1. the furnace room was equipped with five triple-muffle furnaces (15 muf-
fles total) rather than nine quadruple-muffle furnaces (36 muffles total);
2. each furnace had three rather than four muffles;
3. the furnaces were lined up in a straight line along the longitudinal axis of
the furnaces room, rather than grouped together in a semi-circle around the
chimney;
4. the room later labeled as the victims’ undressing room (Morgue #2) was
located in the basement rather than on the ground floor;
5. the room later labeled as gas chamber (Morgue #1) was not on the ground
floor, a little lower than the undressing room, but rather in the basement,
on the same level as the undressing room;
6. the room labeled as a gas chamber was connected to the furnaces room by
an elevator rather than by rails.
According to the current mainstream Holocaust narrative:
7. the gas chamber is said to have had four openings to introduce Zyklon B
rather than three;
8. the introduction shafts are said to have been closed with simple lids made
of cement or wood which could not have sealed the shafts hermetically;
9. the story of the distribution of towels and a piece of soap is a fable;
10. the cremation capacity of a single muffle – three corpses within 90 minutes
(30 min/corpse) – stands in contrast to the official one: two corpses within
half an hour (15 min/corpse; Piper 2000, p. 164);
11. as blueprints show,379 Morgue #1 of Crematoria II and III, the alleged “gas
chamber,” was partially underground; its roof was only 36 cm higher than
the floor of the buildings’ ground floor. To this, we need to add several
inches of soil lying on that roof. The introduction shafts themselves were
only 40-50 cm high either, if we follow Pressac (1989, p. 475). Hence, it
makes no sense to state that the SS men introducing the poison gas climbed
onto the roof of the gas chamber.
From a technical point of view:
12. the claimed cremation capacity of 2,000 corpses within 24 hours for each
of Crematorium II and III, and 1,000 for each of Crematorium IV and V,
totaling 6,000 per day, is utterly absurd;
13. as pointed out earlier, the time it allegedly took for the victims to die –
three minutes – is another absurdity parroted with small variations by many
other witnesses, including Nyiszli himself.
Wetzler’s report is of paramount importance to the propaganda history of
Auschwitz. Since both the report’s sketch and the description of Crematoria II
and III are pure fantasy, it follows that Wetzler’s tale about the extermination
of the Jews in homicidal gas chambers did not originate from members of the
so-called Sonderkommando, but was in fact invented without their knowledge.
This in turn proves that this tale was created by the camp’s resistance move-
ment as atrocity propaganda without even a thought to consulting inmates
working in the crematoria! Further proof for this is Filip Müller’s later claim
that he had handed over to Alfred Wetzler in 1944, among other documents,
“a plan of the crematorium with gas chambers” (“einen Plan der Krematorien
mit den Gaskammern”; Müller 1979a, p. 193), which was obviously another
shameless lie, because had he done so, Wetzler would have gotten it right to
begin with.
4.3.2. The Stories of Hungarian Jews Deported to Auschwitz

In 1945, an important collection of testimonies by Hungarian Jews deported
by the Germans appeared in Budapest. The book, edited by Béla Vihar, is ti-
tled The Yellow Book: Documents about the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry
during the War 1941-1945. It also contains several “protocols” of interroga-
tions of Jews who had been deported to Birkenau. The first is a statement by
Henrik Farkas dated “February 24, 1942” (which evidently must be 1945) that
deals with the Birkenau Camp and in particular with the “gas chamber.” The
379
In particular Plan 109/13A of September 21, 1943. Pressac 1989, p. 323.
respective description is pretty much a mere translation of what appears in

Wetzler’s report, and it even contains the following disclaimer:
“Here I report the technical description of the gas chamber by a Jewish engi-
neer engaged in technical work based on his notes on the gas chamber.” (Vi-
har, pp. 64f.)
The German expression “Cyklon zur Schaedlingsbekaempfung” (Zyklon for
pest control) and the term “Sonderkommando” clearly show that the transla-
tion was not based on the English text of the War Refugee Board, but on a
German text, probably the one edited by Abraham Silberschein in 1944, in
which identical expressions appear (on its p. 100). The capacity given for the
large hall of just 200 people is clearly a mistake, as the number of those enter-
ing the gas chamber is given as 2,000. Even the duration of the execution until
the victims’demise – five minutes instead of three – is undoubtedly the result
of a mistake (Vihar 1945, pp. 64f.).
Here we have to pay tribute to Alain Guionnet, who was the first scholar to
draw attention to this Yellow Book (but also to the original Hungarian edition
of Nyiszli’s book). In particular, he published a complete translation of Far-
kas’s testimony on Birkenau together with a comparative analysis with Wetz-
ler’s report, which, to be honest, is not very convincing (Guionnet 1994, pp.
23-30).
Other ex-deportees also report about Auschwitz in the Yellow Book. Jószef
Sproncz (Vihar 1945, pp. 71-79, undated), among other things, reports that
camp inmates received German newspapers such as the Völkischer Beobach-
ter, the Oberschlesische Zeitung and the Krakauer Zeitung (ibid., pp 78f.).
The first is also mentioned by Nyiszli, who may have taken the idea from this
testimony. Although it is certainly possible that civilian workers who worked
inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex passed newspapers to detainees
– which in general was illegal – no one, as far as I know, explicitly mentioned
the Völkischer Beobachter. Other ex-deportees spoke only of the general con-
ditions inside the camp: Imre Reich,380 Imréné Kenész,381 Dénesné Szépvöl-
gyi,382 Géza Klein,383 Jenő Vámosi,384 who also referred to the “rebellion in
the crematorium,” which, according to him, took place “in September
1944.”385 The latest testimony is that of Károly Klein, written down on July
12, 1945 (ibid., p. 152). Among the promoters of the book was also the “As-
sistance Committee of Deported Hungarian Jews” (Magyaroszági Zsidók De-
portáltakat Gondozó Bizottság), the same organization mentioned by Robert
Jay Lifton in relation to a testimony by a certain “Miklof Nyifcli” of July 28,
380
Vihar 1945, pp. 83-86; undated.
381
Ibid., pp. 88-92. Protocol of March 8, 1945.
382
383
Ibid., pp. 101f. Protocol of March 6, 1945.
384
385
Ibid., p. 115. “Lázadás a krematóriumban.”
1945. It is unknown why this testimony was not included in the book. Chrono-
logical reasons are possible but unlikely, since the book contains a statement
of a couple of weeks earlier.
A “Report by the Hungarian physician Dr. Gyula Gál. Budapest,” dated
March 22, 1945 and written in German on request of the Soviets, contains a
long story about Birkenau. Being destined for the Soviets, the witness claimed
as follows:
“At this place, the Germans exterminated roughly 5 million people, 3 1/2 mil-
lion Jews and roughly 1 1/2 Million Poles and Russians.”
The gassing of the victims took place in a “gas barracks” (Gasbaracke), in this
way:
“400 people at one time were brought into a room with showers, which there-
fore resembled a bathroom. At first, they even gave these unfortunates soaps
and towels, allegedly in order to wash themselves. When all were inside, the
hermetically closing doors were locked, and Zyklon B, a powder full of cya-
nide – the product of a Hamburg firm – was poured out over them. This pow-
der caused death within two minutes.”
There were eight dentists who tore gold teeth out of the corpses, then the
corpses were taken to the crematorium, “where they were cremated within two
hours.” Furthermore we read:386
“This method was used in particular when the crematorium, scheduled for this
respective extermination of 15,000 people could not keep up with the work, i.e.
when more than 15,000 were to be killed. That was mostly the case when new
victims came in large quantities from Hungary and Poland.”
The DEGOB website contains a vast collection of testimonies on Auschwitz,
including the one by Nyiszli, both a scan of the original and a translation into
English. Though the number of testimonies is substantial (3,523 testimonies
by 4,838 individuals, since some statements were authored by several wit-
nesses together), none of these testimonies mentions Nyiszli, and only one is
relevant to the subject of this study. It should be pointed out that this website
keeps these testimonies anonymous; for each testimony, only the initials of the
witness’s first and last name are given, plus the gender, date and place of
birth, profession, as well as the ghettos and camps to which the witness was
deported. I reproduce here the essential passages of interest to the present
study:387
“Protocol Nr. 308 [July 4, 1945]
Name: S. M.
Gender: male
Place of birth: Budapest
386
GARF, 7021-108, pp. 67-74, here pp. 67f.
387
http://degob.org/index.php?showjk=308; last accessed on Jan. 24, 2018; uncorrected English
translation as posted on that website.
Date of birth: 1922

Place of residence: Budapest
Occupation: physician candidate
Camps: Birkenau, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee
[…] The oft-mentioned Mengele’s favourite hobby was research in genetic in-
heritance; therefore he treated twins with special attention. Amongst the Gipsy
children, there were also three pairs of twins, one in the hospital and two pairs
in the kindergarten of the camp. In the morning of the 2nd of August 1944, Dr
Mengele entrusted these children to the head doctor of the Gipsy barrack, Dr
Rabinovits, and came to fetch them personally by car in the evening. Three
days later, Mengele arrived in the hospital pretty upset and looked for the doc-
tor responsible for the Gipsy children. He rapped him over the knuckles for
not examining patients with attention, not caring about them, he claimed that
doctors were interested only in extra food rations, and threatened them with
severe reprisals because they had not noticed or registered on the card the
easily recognisable symptoms of tuberculosis of one of the twins. As an answer
to the question how this had been known, which was raised by the reproached
doctor, Mengele produced with a matter-of-fact gesture a necropsy record, in
which the results of a technically perfect autopsy were proficiently presented
regarding the little child, who had been evidently killed earlier by gas. (When
our transport arrived Mengele’s first question was whether there was a
pathologist among us, and he kept repeating the same question till he found
the pathologist of the public hospital of Szombathely, Dr Dénes Görög.) Bas-
ing my opinion on the two or three very short conversations that I had the op-
portunity to have with Mengele, I join the general opinion of the hospital’s
doctors that Mengele had in fact neurotic disorders. Presumably spotted fever
caused him maniac [sic] depression, and his obsession was to realise eugenic
selections, which had been known on a theoretical level already for a long
time. After the more or less six-week service in hospital, I became the Vertreter
(second commander) of one of the blocks, and as such, I was in charge of
around six hundred 14 to 18-year-old boys. In the first days of September,
Mengele did selections among these boys and sorted out around 60 percentage
[sic] of them, and closed them in a separate block. I do not know what hap-
pened to them in the end, because in the meantime I also left Birkenau, but I
am convinced that they finished in the crematorium as well. In the middle of
September, I arrived in Mauthausen with a transport of around 2,000 people.”
It is remarkable that this former Jewish deportee from Hungary, evidently a
medical student who even knew Dr. Dénes Görög, obviously did not know
anything about Nyiszli and was unaware of Mengele’s alleged criminal exper-
iments, specifically the claimed chloroform injections into the hearts of the
victims.
Part 5:
Nyiszli’s Statements
in the Orthodox
Holocaust Narrative
5.1. The Quotation Cherry Pickers

From the beginning, the nascent historiography of the Holocaust considered
testimonies about the gas chambers not as objects of history which themselves
required examination and verification, but as history itself. No one considered
the problem that any or all parts of these testimonies could be, at their core,
false or simply unreliable, and no one, with the sole exception of Jean-Claude
Pressac,388 bothered to analyze or evaluate them as a whole. Instead, the testi-
monies were broken into pieces, extracted from context and utilized in a frag-
mentary way to compose a mosaic of “historical reconstruction” whose tesser-
ae, though apparently congruous and complementary, in reality belonged to
different, conflicting pictures. Without doubt the founding father of this
“method” was Gerald Reitlinger. In his laconic description of the presumed
extermination procedure in the “gas chambers” of Auschwitz, he juxtaposes
extracts from the statements of “eyewitnesses” – Ada Bimko, Miklós Nyiszli,
Charles Sigismund Bendel – which are transparently false and mutually con-
tradictory (Reitlinger 1953, pp. 150-152):
“A letter from Messrs. Toepf [sic] to Bischoff, dated February 12th, 1943,
shows that in each crematorium there were five three-door furnaces with me-
chanical stokers, ash tips, and corpse lifts, but in the two larger crematoria the
gas chambers were on the same level as the furnaces to which the corpses
were run on the rail-wagon seen and described by Dr. Ada Bimko. The under-
ground gas chambers of the smaller crematoria were approached by a sub-
way, gently graded, down which Dr. Nyiszli saw fathers of families pushing
perambulators.
The aspect of the buildings, according to Dr. Nyiszli, who lived in one of them
for six months, was not unfriendly, in spite of the chimneys, so ominously big
for a mere bath house. […]
Slowly the gas escaped from the perforations in the sheet-metal columns. Gen-
erally the victims would be too tightly packed to notice this at first, but at other
times they would be few enough to sit in comfort, gazing up at the douches,
from which no water came, or at the floor which, strange to say, had no drain-
age runnels. […]
Twenty-five minutes later, the ‘exhauster’ electric pumps removed the gas-
laden air, the great metal door slid open, and the men of the Jewish Sonder-
kommando entered, wearing gas masks and gum boots and carrying hoses, for
their first task was to remove the blood and defecation before dragging the
clawing dead apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search
for gold and the removal of the dentures and hair which were regarded by the
388
I refer in particular to his analysis of Henryk Tauber’s testimony (Pressac 1989, pp. 481-502), alt-
hough it is somewhat lacking. See Mattogno 2015a, pp. 367-416.
Germans as strategic materials. Then the journey by lift or rail-wagon to the

furnaces, the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the lorry that scat-
tered the ashes in the stream of the Sola. […] I quote Dr. Bendel, as he gave
his evidence at Lueneburg:
‘Now a real hell begins. The Sonderkommando tries to work as fast as possi-
ble. In frenzied haste they drag the corpses by the wrists. They look like devils.
People who had human faces before, I no longer recognize. A barrister from
Salonika, an electrical engineer from Budapest – they are no longer human
beings, because, even as they work, blows from sticks and rubber truncheons
are showered on them. All the time this is going on, people are being shot in
front of the ditches, people who could not be got into the gas chambers be-
cause they were overcrowded. After an hour-and-a-half the whole work has
been done, and a new transport has been dealt with in Crematorium No. 4.’”
It would be all too facile to expose Reitlinger’s crass errors in order to dismiss
present-day, orthodox Holocaust historiography in toto, as the latter unfailing-
ly does by exposing Paul Rassinier’s errors in order to attack present-day revi-
sionism.389 Such is not the goal of the brief analysis which follows, even if, as
we evaluate the method employed by Reitlinger, it behooves us not to forget
that his book, at the time of its publication, brought together and synthesized
in the highest degree all of orthodox historiography’s “proofs” regarding the
“gas chambers.”
The letter from “Messrs. Toepf,” that is, from the firm J. A. Topf & Söhne,
dated February 12, 1943, was taken by Reitlinger, without any indication of its
source, probably from the Soviet report on Auschwitz presented at Nuremberg
as Document USSR-8.10 As reproduced in Volume XXXIX of the IMT rec-
ords (where Reitlinger presumably found it), the text is a retranslation into
German from a Russian translation of the German original, garbled in the pro-
cess with gross errors of fact and interpretation, as a comparison with the orig-
inal text390 demonstrates. For example, the letter, which was originally di-
rected to the “Zentral-Bauleitung der Waffen-SS und Polizei” of Auschwitz,
in retranslation becomes addressed to the “Zentralbauverwaltung der SS und
Polizei.” Worse, the subject of the letter (the “Re:” line), which in the original
is “Krematorium II und III KGL” (“Crematorium II and III of the PoW
Camp”), in retranslation becomes “Krematorien fuer das zweite und dritte Ge-
fangenenlager” or “Crematoria for the second and third prisoner camp”! Most
bizarrely, the retranslation misconstrues a key passage in the Topf letter in
which it quotes a telegram the firm had previously received from the Central
Construction Office such that it has the SS acknowledging the receipt of or-
389
It is sufficient to cite as representative here Lipstadt 1994, pp. 51-64 et passim.
390
APMO, BW30/34, p. 84. This document is reproduced in facsimile, with an accompanying Eng-
lish translation, in: Pressac 1989, p. 361. The document itself, it should be noted, is a typed copy
(“Abschrift”) of the original letter; the copy is signed by Zentralbauleitung employee SS Unter-
sturmführer Josef Janisch.
ders from Topf, rather than confirming its own orders to Topf! Original
text:390
“Für Krematorium III KGL 5mal Dreimuffelöfen wird der bereits getätigte
Auftrag der gesamten Maschineneinrichtung einschließlich 2 Stück endgülti-
gen elektrischen Leichenaufzügen und einem provisorischen kurzfristig liefer-
baren Leichenaufzug sowie einer praktischen Kohlenbeschickung und Asche-
transportvorrichtung nochmals bestätigt.”
“For Crematorium III [of the] PoW Camp [with] 5 three-muffle furnaces, the
order already placed for the complete mechanical installations, including 2
permanent electrical corpse elevators and one provisional corpse elevator to
be available in the short term, as well as a practical installation for coal de-
livery and ash transport is once again confirmed.”
Retranslation (IMT, Vol. XXXIX, p. 243):
“Wir bestaetigen nochmals den Empfang Ihres Auftrags fuer fuenf dreiteilige
Verbrennungsoefen einschliesslich zwei elektrischen Aufzuegen fuer die Befo-
erderung von Leichen und einem zweiteiligen Aufzug fuer Leichen. Eine
brauchbare Einrichtung fuer die Beheizung mit Kohle und eine Vorrichtung
fuer die Entfernung der Asche sind ebenfalls in Auftrag gegeben.”
“We confirm once more receipt of your order for five three-part cremation
furnaces, including two electric elevators for the transport of corpses and one
two-part elevator for corpses. A usable device for heating with coal and a
mechanism for the removal of ashes are ordered as well.”
What matters most here, however, is how Reitlinger interpreted the document.
Leaving aside minor details, we may note simply that he attributes five triple-
muffle furnaces to all four of the Birkenau crematoria (“in each crematorium
there were five three-door furnaces”), and that he confuses the two larger
crematoria (II and III, provided with half-basement rooms identified today as
“undressing rooms” and “gas chambers”) with the two smaller crematoria (IV
and V, with all rooms on the ground floor), writing at once of how “in the two
larger crematoria the gas chambers were on the same level as the furnaces”
and of “[the] underground gas chambers of the smaller crematoria.”
From Ada Bimko, Reitlinger picks up the fable of the cart on rails which
carried bodies from the “gas chamber” to the cremation furnaces, a detail “re-
vealed” also by Wetzler but denied ex silentio by Nyiszli.
To the latter, on the other hand, he attributes the description of a sloping
passage (“subway”), down which fathers push their children in baby carriages
into the crematorium building – a description which is simply invented by
Reitlinger. In this case, he seems to have been led astray by his faulty under-
standing of French when reading the translation of the relevant passage from
Nyiszli’s book as published in 1951 in “Les Temps Modernes.” The image is
cobbled together from two sentences. The first – “Les bébès, le plus sovent,
sont transportés dans les bras du père, ou bien ces derniers poussent la voi-
ture” (“The babies for the most part are carried in the arms of their father, or
these latter [i.e., fathers, sic]391 push them in carriages”; Nyiszli 1951, p. 1662)
– comes from the scene, in Chapter VII, in which the long column of selected
Jews enters the courtyard of Crematorium II. The second then appears a cou-
ple of paragraphs later as the column of Jews is described arriving “jusqu’à
une rampe de fer, d’où dix ou douze marches en béton conduisent sous terre”
(“at an iron railing from which ten or twelve concrete steps lead below
ground”; ibid.). The French term “rampe” can mean both railing and ramp.
Reitlinger has therefore misunderstood, but how could he think of an “iron
ramp” (like an access ramp to a garage) having concrete steps?392
Reitlinger’s reference to the gas which “escaped from the perforations in
the sheet-metal columns” is also taken from Nyiszli, but the latter knew noth-
ing of “douches” (i.e., shower heads) installed in the “gas chambers”; this par-
ticular detail Reitlinger takes once again from Ada Bimko. Moreover, while
Reitlinger notes that “no water came” from these shower heads, he is careful
to refrain from mentioning that, according to Bimko’s testimony, the gas came
from them (Phillips 1949, p. 742):
“The S.S, man told me that the pipes, which were in the floor, were connected
to the spray fittings in the gas chamber below.”
Reitlinger repeats Ada Bimko’s claim that there were no “drainage runnels” in
the “gas chambers,” but then goes on to report Nyiszli’s claims about using
hoses to wash down the blood- and excrement-soiled corpses without so much
as asking himself where this filthy liquid was supposed to end up going. Once
again, as in the case of the iron “ramp,” Reitlinger demonstrates an incredible
lack of critical sense.
The “‘exhauster’ electric pumps” also come from Nyiszli’s account.
Reitlinger obviously felt the need to flag the term (which he misspells), but as
I have already explained above, the term exhauster (German Exhaustor) does
not designate any particular system of construction, but rather is simply a ge-
neric term for a ventilation or air-exhaust device. He then transforms the large,
double-leaved oak door (“[…] un SS ouvre à deux battants la grande porte en
chêne”; Nyiszli 1951, p. 1663), which the SS manually open and which leads
directly into the “gas chamber” in Nyiszli’s account, into a “great metal door”
which “slid open.”
In the last section of his description, Reitlinger outdoes himself again, in-
venting a “mill that ground the clinker to fine ash” and confusing the Sola
with the Vistula as the river into which this ash allegedly was discarded. He
391
The quoted text is revised in the 1961 Julliard edition to eliminate the awkward switch in number
from “père” to “ces derniers”: “Les bébès, le plus sovent, sont transportés dans les bras du père,
ou bien ce dernier pousse leur voiture” (Nyiszli 1961a, p. 53).
392
Remarkably, the same error was made by Richard Seaver when retranslating Tibère Kremer’s
French version into English in 1960: “they advanced […] to an iron ramp, from which 10 or 12
concrete steps led underground”; Nyiszli 1960, p. 44; emphasis added).
then caps it all off with a quotation from Charles Bendel, but of all the various
statements of this notorious “eyewitness,” he sees fit to use only a few sen-
tences from the Belsen trial record (which are practically irrelevant anyway),
all the while observing a discreet silence regarding the glaring contradictions
between them and the statements of Ada Bimko and Nyiszli. And this was the
man who blazed the trail of orthodox Holocaust history for Raul Hilberg!
Such a pattern of selective quotation is nothing unusual in mainstream his-
toriography. Another Holocaust exegete who distinguished himself by his use
of this “method” was the French historian Georges Wellers, particularly in his
anti-revisionist book Les chambres à gaz ont existé (The Gas Chambers Exist-
ed), in which he presented the customary jumble of contradictory testimonies
and even a “Comparative analysis of the testimonies” – the conclusion of
which, naturally, was that, while they certainly displayed some inevitable “di-
vergences,” nonetheless “on the essential point, all these testimonies are in
agreement” (Wellers 1981, pp. 96-129, here p. 129). This dodge is entirely fu-
tile and inconsequential, however, for the “essential point” of the various tes-
timonies boils down to the existence of the “gas chambers,” and on this “es-
sential point” they nonetheless each give divergent and mutually contradictory
accounts.
Nor did Raul Hilberg himself escape this practice. His exposition of the
presumed extermination procedure at Auschwitz perfectly illustrates his
method of cherry-picking phrases from mutually contradictory testimonies in
order to create a factitious portrait that is seemingly coherent and supported by
multiple sources (Hilberg 2003, p. 1041):
“When the Auschwitz victims filed into the gas chambers, they discovered that
the imitation showers did not work [note 91]. Outside, a central switch was
pulled to turn off the lights [note 92], and a Red Cross car drove up with the
Zyklon [note 93]. An SS man, wearing a gas mask fitted with a special filter,
lifted the glass shutter over the lattice and emptied one can after another into
the gas chamber. Although the lethal dose was one milligram per kilogram of
body weight[393] and the effect was supposed to be rapid, dampness could re-
tard with which the gas was spreading [note 94]. Untersturmführer Grabner,
political officer of the camp, stood ready with stopwatch in hand [note 95].”
In these few lines, Hilberg calls upon five witnesses and one judge – Jan Sehn
[note 91], Miklós Nyiszli [note 92], Charles Bendel [note 93], Rudolf Höss
and Filip Müller [note 94], and Pery Broad [note 95] – without troubling him-
self in the least with the strident contradictions which they present among
each other, and all the while pretending that they collectively form a harmoni-
ous portrait which is coherent with the presumed facts. Rather tellingly, out-
393
This is a plausible lethal dose for hydrogen cyanide (HCN) when ingested orally. To reach this
dose when inhaling gaseous hydrogen cyanide, numerous factors come into play, such as concen-
tration in the air, breathing volume and speed, physical fitness etc.
side of this one footnote, he does not have the courage to so much as mention
Nyiszli in the rest of his massive three-volume study.
Worse still, a similar method has been adopted – and indeed continues to
be employed – even by the official Auschwitz State Museum in Poland. Alt-
hough it has published various testimonies in whole or in part (as, for exam-
ple, those of Rudolf Höss, Pery Broad, Henryk Tauber, Stanisław Jankowski,
and various members of the Sonderkommando), it has never bothered to sub-
ject these individual testimonies to critical analysis in order to ascertain their
degree of veracity, limiting itself instead to simple explanatory annotations. In
the case that interests us here, Franciszek Piper, former director of the Musem
and for years chair of its Historical Department, cites Nyiszli twenty times in
the German translation of his study on “Extermination” at Auschwitz, with the
usual mosaic of selective quotations, seeking to “document” otherwise-
unknown aspects of the history of the camp of which Nyiszli remains the sole
guarantor.
Piper’s first mention of Nyiszli involves a long quotation relative to the
dissection hall of Crematorium II (2000, p. 115), on the dispostion and fur-
nishing of which Piper evidently knows nothing from other sources. Later in
the study, he provides a detailed description of Crematoria II and III, even re-
producing an architectural plan of the buildings,394 but when it comes to the
presumed gassings there, he is forced to alternately rely on or reject Nyiszli’s
account on numerous details, including:
1. “Gas Chamber” Sign
Piper relies on Nyiszli about a sign in various languages allegedly posted at
the entrance to the “gas chamber” saying “To Baths and Disinfection” (ibid.,
p. 169). However, Piper stays mute about the absurd dimensions Nyiszli at-
tributes to the “undressing room” and “gas chamber,” each 200 meters long in
his description. It is worth mentioning here as well that the German translation
of Nyiszli’s book referred to by Piper in his notes to his study correctly trans-
lates the relevant passage as “einen etwa 200 Meter langen […] Raum” (“an
approximately 200-meter-long […] room”; Nyiszli 1992, p. 34), but the Polish
translation published one year later, which Piper himself annotated, crudely
falsifies the text here, saying that the room in question “ma około 50 metrów
długości” (“has a length of about 50 meters”; Nyiszli 1996, p. 35), nearly
identical to the real value of 49.43 meters! On the other hand, the two transla-
tions are in agreement in eliminating Nyiszli’s embarrassing reference to
chlorine and “granular form” in his description of Zyklon B. Where the origi-
nal text has
“A beszórt anyag Cyclon, vagy Chlór szemcsés formája, azonnal gázt fejleszt,
amint a levegővel érintkezik!” (Nyiszli 1946, p. 35)
394
Since the buildings were built as mirror images of one another, one plan suffices for both.
“The material poured out is Cyclon, or chlorine in granular form; it immedi-

ately gives off gas as soon as it comes into contact with air!” (MBV, Chapter
VII)
in translation this becomes, respectively (Nyiszli 1992, p. 36):
„Die Substanz: Zyklon B. Im Kontakt mit der Luft entwickelt sich aus der Sub-
stanz ein Gas […]”
(“The substance: Zyklon B. In contact with air, a gas develops from out of the
substance […]”)
And (Nyiszli 1996, p. 37):
“To cyklon. Natychmiast po zetknięciu się z powietrzem wydziela się gaz.”
(“This is Zyklon. Immediately upon contact with air, gas develops.”)
2. The Capacity of the “Gas Chambers”

On this, Piper wrote (2000, pp. 169f.):
“By beating and turning dogs on the recalcitrant, as many as 2,000 men,
women and children could be jammed inside. (In practice, this capacity was
used only rarely, at peak periods of arriving transports.)”
For Nyiszli, however, the capacity of the “gas chambers” was 3,000 people,
and that number did not represent an exception, but was rather the norm.
3. The Gassing Procedure
For his principal source here, Piper turns to former Auschwitz commandant
Rudolf Höss, whose notes on “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in
the Auschwitz Concentration Camp,” written for his Polish jailers while
awaiting execution in 1947, provides the following quotation:395
“It could be observed through the peep hole in the door that those who were
standing nearest the induction vents were killed at once. It can be said that
about one-third died straight away. The remainder staggered about and began
to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to the
death rattle and in a few minutes all lay still. After twenty minutes at the latest
no movement could be discerned.”
However, the supposed devices for introducing Zyklon B are described by
Piper (drawing on still other sources) as columns “made of two layers of wire
mesh” (ibid., p. 166), while Nyiszli wrote of “perforated sheet-metal pipes”
(Nyiszli 1946, p. 35).
4. Cremation Devices
Piper focuses first on the question of furnace loaders (2000, p. 171, FN 494):
“In Crematoria II and III there was one pair of movable rollers per oven
(three receptacles); in Crematoria IV and V, each receptacle had its own roll-
ers. […] Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Account, pp. 51-55”
395
Piper 2000, p. 170; verbatim taken from Bezwińska/Czech 1984, pp. 134f.
This note refers to the loading rollers (Laufrollen) originally placed below the
door of a cremation muffle in order to facilitate the insertion of corpses into
the muffle using a corpse-introduction cart before this system was replaced by
more-practical introduction stretchers.396 Piper explains all this to his reader in
his text. Though cited as a source, Nyiszli not only does not confirm Piper’s
description, he flatly contradicts it. Nyiszli knew nothing of triple-muffled
furnaces, but rather believed that in each of the four crematoria there were fif-
teen individual furnaces with one muffle each. Likewise, Nyiszli knew noth-
ing of the corpse-introduction cart having been replaced by stretchers. He in-
stead described devices more or less corresponding to the corpse-introduction
carts, which were no longer in use in Birkenau by 1944 (see p. 200). Moreo-
ver, Nyiszli never mentions the rollers and never talks about the furnaces of
Crematoria IV and V. Piper’s reference to the “rollers” probably derives from
a slightly too-casual translation of the German version (Nyiszli 1992, p. 39):
“Jeweils drei werden auf ein aus Stahlplatten hergestelltes Rollgestell gelegt.
Automatisch öffnen sich die schweren Eisentüren […].”
“Three at a time are placed on a rolling framework made of steel plates. The
heavy iron doors open automatically […]”
The Hungarian text states instead:
“These [the members of the cremation Kommando] then place them [the
corpses] three at a time on a pushing device made of steel plates. The fur-
nace’s heavy iron doors open automatically. The device moving on iron
wheels rolls into the glowing furnace, drops its load, slides back, heated to in-
candescence.” (MBV, Chapter VII)
5. Duration of the Cremations

Piper asserts that, according to the statements of members of the Sonderkom-
mando, “Crematoria II and III could each burn about 2,500 bodies per day.” In
a note to the quoted passage he then explains (2000, pp. 171f.):
“According to Feinsilber and Tauber, about 2,500 corpses per day were
burned in each of Crematoria II and III; according to Höss, approximately
2,000. [Sources for Alter Feinsilber, Henryk Tauber, Kurt Markus, Rudolf
Höss and Pery Broad…]; Nyiszli, Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Account, p. 55”
On the page indicated, however, Nyiszli not only advances a capacity of 5,000
corpses per day for Crematorium II, but also affirms that the total capacity for
the four Birkenau crematoria was in fact 20,000 corpses per day – because, as
mentioned earlier, he believed that each crematorium was equipped with fif-
teen single-muffle furnaces. Piper shows not the least concern for these in-
credible absurdities in his supposed source, going on to tranquilly affirm that
396
For this question, and that of Nyiszli’s numbering of the cremation furnaces immediately follow-
ing, see the discussion in Section 3.2.3.
Crematoria IV and V had a daily capacity of 1,500 corpses each (ibid., p.

173), or 3,000 between them, instead of the 10,000 claimed by Nyiszli!
6. The “Bunkers” of Birkenau
Piper dedicates an entire section to the “Bunkers” of Birkenau and provides a
plan and a detailed description of “Bunker 2,” alleged to have contained four
“gas chambers” (ibid., pp. 138-140). As I have pointed out above, however,
for Nyiszli there existed neither a “Bunker 2” nor four “gas chambers,” but
merely a run-down farmhouse with a single room which served as an undress-
ing room for the victims who were to be shot at the two burning pits. Piper
takes not the slightest notice of so extreme a contradiction from a source he is
elsewhere content to use, pretending instead, as with all the others, that it
simply does not exist.
7. Executions
Referring to Chapter IX of Nyiszli’s book, Piper writes that small groups of
people were executed with firearms in the crematoria (ibid., p. 179):
“including Soviet prisoners of war and Poles sentenced by the summary court
in Katowice.”
In reality, the victims whom Nyiszli speaks of are completely different from
those claimed by Piper, namely women selected from Sector BIIc (women’s
camp):
“They are the selected from camp section C […] every evening at seven a
truck brings seventy over.” (MBV, Chapter IX; Nyiszli 1992, p. 48)
Later, in Chapter XXII, Nyiszli returns to the theme, and the class of victims
expands to include men:
“[…] each evening around seven o’clock, a truck passes through the cremato-
rium gate and brings seventy to eighty women or men for liquidation. They are
the daily selections of the K.Z. They arrive here from the barracks and the
hospitals.” (Nyiszli 1992, p. 85)
Contrary to what Piper claims, the routine (“nightly”) executions Nyiszli
claimed to have witnessed at the crematorium evidently had nothing to do
with Soviet POWs or Poles condemned to death by the Gestapo.397
8. The Sonderkommando Revolt
At one point in his study, Piper refers to Nyiszli’s assertion that the
Sonderkommando, when he entered it in June of 1944, consisted of 860 pris-
oners (Piper 2000, p. 185, FN 558). As I have pointed out earlier, Piper af-
397
Admittedly, in Chapter XXIX Nyiszli does dissect the corpse of a Russian officer shot during an
escape attempt (and thus not executed per se), and in Chapter XXXVII he talks to a group of
Poles condemned for various offences by the Gestapo. The latter incident is alleged to have oc-
curred at Crematorium V on January 1, 1945, after the “suspension” of regular killing operations
at Birkenau, and marks the last occasion Nyiszli speaks of executions at the camp; it is also the
sole occasion he speaks in the book of the execution of non-Jewish Poles.
firms that, during the course of the revolt on October 7, 1944, 451 prisoners
were killed and 212 were left alive (Piper 2000, p. 187), whereas Nyiszli of
course writes that 853 were killed and only 7 survived (MBV, Chapter
XXIX).
A few lines further still, Piper relates that, after the revolt was surpressed,
in the courtyard of Crematorium II
“First, Dr. Mengele’s assistants—the physicians Nyiszli, Korner and Gorög,
and laboratory technician Fischer—were picked out, along with 30 prisoners
who would work in Crematorium V, the only one still operating.” (Piper 2000,
p. 188)
Nyiszli, on the other hand, recounts that on this occasion the only people
“picked out” from among the inmates were himself and his three assistants:
the entire twelfth Sonderkommando was exterminated, and the thirty prisoners
in question were not survivors of the revolt and were not even part of the
Sonderkommando, but rather were a simple squad of prisoners instituted after
the extermination as the core of a new, thirteenth Sonderkommando (MBV,
Chapter XXXV)!
For Piper, of the 212 survivors – all exterminated according to Nyiszli – 70
were assigned to the Abbruchkommando (demolition squad) while the remain-
ing 100398 were told that they would be transferred to the Gross-Rosen con-
centration camp. Among the latter group, Piper assures us, was also included
“the Sonderkommando physician, Dr. Pach” (Piper 2000, p. 188)399 – a per-
sonage who did not exist at all for Nyszli, he being, by his own account, the
only doctor of the Sonderkommando.
These 100 prisoners, Piper continues, were also soon killed. In the relevant
note he indicates the number of those killed according to various witnesses:
170 for the anonymous note of November 26, 1944 (attributed to Lejb
Langfus), only 100 for Szlama Dragon. At his footnote’s conclusion, he then
adds the following citation: “Nyiszli, Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Account, p. 198”
(ibid., p. 188, FN 568). On the pages cited, however, Nyiszli recounts the ex-
termination of the thirteenth Sonderkommando (not the remnants of the
twelfth), which according to him consisted of 460 prisoners; these were first
gathered in the furnace hall of Crematorium III then taken outside the camp to
be killed, with the exception of Nyiszli himself and his three assistants (MBV,
Chapter XXXV).
For his part, Piper recounts the story as follows (ibid.):
“They were killed not far from the camp and their bodies delivered to the
crematorium the next day to be burned.”
In the attached footnote he then elaborates (ibid., Note 569):
398
Adding the numbers up, this makes for 4 + 30 + 70 + 100 = 204 prisoners. Piper has forgotten to
clarify the fate of his remaining eight survivors.
399
For more on Pach, see in particular Section 5.2.2.
“Nyiszli saw their burned bodies; they were brought to Crematorium II the
next day for immolation. He reports that they had been killed with flame-
throwers, a conclusion certainly prompted by the visible burns on their bodies.
Most probably, however, they had been shot and then brought to the cremato-
rium after an unsuccessful attempt at burning in the open air.”
Leaving aside the fact that the context of Nyiszli’s account is in total and ir-
remediable conflict with Piper’s, Nyiszli as a witness did not conclude any-
thing, but rather declares with certainty that the prisoners in question were
killed using flamethrowers, firmly counting this procedure on his ongoing list
as “the seventh type of death” which he has seen used by the SS (MBV, Chap-
ter XXXV).
Furthermore, Piper’s explanation is manifestly a shabby ad hoc deception,
for he himself has previously asserted in another publication that, during the
Hungarian action at Birkenau, bodies were routinely “burned at the rate of
about 5,000 corpses in 24 hours in the incineration pits near the crematoria”
and that “[the] same number were incinerated in the pits of bunker 2” (Piper
1994, p. 173). As such, it clearly is absurd to suggest that the SS should have
failed in an “attempt at burning [the bodies] in the open air” – that is, in those
very same cremation pits – when there were only 100 corpses to be burned.
Next, a long quotation from Nyiszli’s book permits Piper to describe the
presumed living conditions of the Sonderkommando men in the crematoria
(2000, pp. 191f.). To this, Piper then adds (ibid., p. 193):
“Dr. Pach continued to treat the patients [in the crematorium’s infirmary]. In
addition, Drs. Miklós Nyiszli (from June 1944) and Charles Bendel (from Au-
gust 1944) acted as Sonderkommando physicians.”
In their respective statements, however, Nyiszli and Bendel not only ignore
one another, but each pretends to have been the only doctor of the Sonderkom-
mando, and the only doctor to have survived! In a note here, Piper refers to
Nyiszli’s book (with a prudent “passim”; FN 590), as well as to the later fanci-
ful account by Filip Müller, of which I will have more to say in Chapter 5.2.
In truth, of course, as I have noted earlier, Nyiszli mentions Bendel only once
in his book, and then not in relation to the Sonderkommando. Had Piper indi-
cated the precise page in which this sole reference occurs, he would have
placed his whole factitious construct at risk. This is what Nyiszli actually
wrote:
“The Gypsy camp has a point of special interest, the experimental barracks
located there. Professor Dr. Epstein […] is chief of the research lab. […] His
assistant is Dr. Bendel, lecturer in the faculty of medicine at Paris.” (MBV,
Chapter IV)
A “Dr. Bendel” thus appears in Nyiszli’s book, once and only once, as assis-
tant in the research lab at the Gypsy camp; of his supposed presence at the
crematoria as a doctor for the Sonderkommando, Nyiszli knows nothing what-
soever. Despite this obvious fact, Piper puts both men in the Sonderkomman-
do, at the same time, and even has the effrontery to cite their respective state-
ments in various places, without ever informing his readers of this glaring
contradiction between them. It is only too evident that such a “method” of ci-
tation is not only poor scholarship, it is actively deceptive.
Nor is Piper’s scholarly malfeasance limited to selective or misleading ci-
tations. I have exposed above a falsification in the Polish translation of
Nyiszli’s book which Piper annotated and endorsed, but it is not the only such
manipulation. Another, no less crude, appears in the very same chapter, the
seventh. The original text is as follows:
“The whine of electric motors becomes audible. They have turned on the giant
blowers which fan the fire to the proper temperature inside the furnaces. Fif-
teen blowers of this kind are in operation at once! One is installed next to each
furnace. The cremation hall is about 150 meters long, a brightly lit, white-
washed, concrete-floored space with enormous, iron-barred windows. The fif-
teen cremation furnaces are installed separately in large red-brick struc-
tures.” (MBV, Chapter VII, emphasis added)
Here is the Polish version (Nyiszli 1996, p. 34):
“Odzywa się szum prądnic, rozpoczynają pracę ogromne wentylatory: w
piecach podnosi się temperaturę do najwyższego stopnia. Pracuje jed-
nocześnie kilka dużych wentylatorów. Przy każdym piecu jeden. Pomieszczen-
ie, w którym pali się zwłoki, jest duże, jasne, wybielone, z betonową podłogą i
olbrzymimi, okratowanymi oknami. Paleniska obudowano czerwoną cegłą,
każdy piec osobno.”
And here it is again, retranslated into English:
“The hum of electric generators is heard, enormous ventilators start to work:
in the furnace the temperature rises to the highest degree. Several large venti-
lators are working simultaneously. There is one beside each furnace. The
room in which the bodies are burned is large, brightly lit, painted white, with
a concrete floor and huge, barred windows. The hearths are encased in red
brick, each furnace separately.”
Smaller differences aside, we note at once that all absurd references to the
150-meter length of the room and to fifteen ventilators in operation beside fif-
teen separate furnaces have been eliminated.
Similarly, further along in the same chapter the phrase “Four large me-
chanical freight elevators are in operation here” (MBV, Chapter VII) be-
comes, in Polish, “pracuje tam wielki dźwig towarowy” (Nyiszli 1996, p. 39)
which translates to “a large freight elevator is working here.”
Later, speaking of the “thatch-roofed farmhouse” near the two pyres in
Chapter XIII, Nyiszli affirms that “There is no gas chamber which they be-
lieve to be a shower room,” since as far as he is concerned the house is a sim-
ple undressing room for the victims who are to be shot at the pyres. The Polish
version, on the other hand, eliminates Nyiszli’s embarrassing reference to the

non-existence of gas chambers in the building: “Nie ma budynku, który mogli-
by uważać za łaźnię” (ibid., p. 64), which translates to “There is no building
which could be considered a bathhouse.”
The deception is then completed with a pair of captious annotations by
Piper. First, on the “thatch-roofed farmhouse” (ibid., p. 176, Note 27):
“This is the provisional gas chamber which was put into operation in mid-
1942 following the adaptation of a farmhouse in Brzezinka (Birkenau). After
the four crematoria and gas chambers started operating, this chamber was not
used. It resumed operation again in May 1944, during the period of mass in-
flux of Hungarian Jewish transports. It was initially called ‘white house’ or
‘bunker 2,’ in 1944 the name ‘bunker 5.’ was also used.”
And then on the shootings at the pyres (ibid., Note 28):
“This system of execution by shooting was rare. Usually the corpses of people
murdered with gas in the gas chamber were burned.”
Thus, the mention of the “farmhouse,” which for Nyiszli explicitly was not a
“gas chamber,” becomes for Piper a confirmation of “the gas chambers”! Nat-
urally he does not explain why Nyiszli himself never used any of the names
for the building, allegedly in common circulation, of “white house” or “bunker
2” or “bunker 5.” And then in the second note, the shootings at the pyres
which Nyiszli describes as the only system in use at the location, are trans-
formed by Piper into a rarity!
Another manipulation in the Polish version concerns the description of the
activities of the “Dayan.” The passage in Nyiszli’s original reads as follows:
“I had no other arguments. The Ober accepted them, and at my suggestion the
man was sent to the so-called Canada rubbish heap burning in the courtyard
of Crematorium II. […] The Canada rubbish heap was a constantly burning
mound; in this place hundreds of thousands of photographs of married cou-
ples, elderly parents, attractive children and beautiful girls burned in the com-
pany of thousands of prayer books.” (MBV, Chapter XXXV, emphasis added)
The Polish version, in turn, reads (Nyiszli 1996, p. 150):
“Nie miałem innych argumentów, ale Oberscharführer zgodził się i z tymi i na
moją prośbe dajan został przydzielony do pracy przy śmietniku znajdującym
się na podwórzu II krematorium. […] Ten wielki śmietnik ciągle płonie.”
And translated into English:
“I had no other arguments, but the Oberscharführer accepted them and on my
prayer the dajan was assigned to work at the garbage dump in the courtyard
of Crematorium II. [...] This great garbage burns continuously.”
The Polish translation – with Piper’s editorial connivance – thus finesses away
the embarrassing fact that Nyiszli apparently believed that the extensive, thir-
ty-barrack storage complex next to Crematorium IV known as “Canada” in
camp slang was actually a burning rubbish heap in the courtyard of a different
crematorium some 250 meters away!
And where the translation does not falsify the original text, Piper still
sometimes seeks to mislead the reader with deceptive annotations. For exam-
ple, describing his departure from the crematorium with his companions after
the flight of the SS in Chapter XXXVIII, Nyiszli writes:
“With a happy feeling of liberation, we start on our way. Direction: K.Z.
Birkenau! It is at a distance of two kilometers from the crematorium.”
The Polish translation is accurate (ibid., p. 158), but notice the misleading
comment by Piper (ibid., p. 180, note 59):
“The crematoria are directly inside that camp. Nyiszli certainly had in mind
the main gate of the camp.”
Nyiszli says nothing at all about the distance to the camp’s gate, however, he
explicitly affirms that the camp itself is two kilometers away from the crema-
toria. And if there were any lingering doubts on that question, one would need
only to look at the next two sentences in his account:
“The flames of great fires flicker on the horizon! Probably the K.Z. is burn-
ing!”
For Nyiszli, the K.Z. itself, not its gate, is two kilometers away on the hori-
zon! Piper makes no attempt to confront the implications of this sort of blatant
error on Nyiszli’s part: he simply tries to finesse them away, pushing aside all
critical sense in the process – in the hope, no doubt, that his readers will do so
too.
Piper thus displays a sort of dual complicity here, conniving – indeed par-
ticipating, as editor – in the manipulations of the Polish translation (of which
he could not possibly be unaware), but conniving also in the many absurdities
offered up by Nyiszli, allowing them to stand unchallenged wherever they
may pass, without too much embarrassment, in the propaganda framework of
the orthodox Holocaust narrative.
Referring to the consequences of the Sonderkommando revolt, Nyiszli
writes at the end of Chapter XXIX:
“Eight hundred and fifty-three prisoners had died. Seventy SS soldiers were
killed. Among them were an Obersturmführer, seventeen Oberscharführer and
Scharführer, and fifty-two Sturmmann, that is, mere privates,”
In a note on this point, Piper observes that the number of SS men killed given
by Nyiszli is not substantiated by other sources, rather it is refuted by Stand-
ortbefehl (Garrison Order) No. 26/44 of October 12, 1944, which I mentioned
earlier (Section 3.6.2.). Piper then states that 451 inmates of the Sonderkom-
mando were killed in the revolt while 212 survived (ibid., Note 48 on p. 179).
Nyiszli, on the other hand, claims that only seven inmates survived. How can
we explain this blatant contradiction? Piper does not address it, and as usual
does not exhibit even the most basic critical attitude. He is therefore fully
conniving both with the manipulations of the Polish translation of Nyiszli’s
book, which he must have been aware of,400 and with the absurdities uttered
by Nyiszli.
400
The Polish translation is from 1996, while the German, more-accurate one, which Piper cites ex-
cessively in his 1999 study “Vernichtung,” dates back to 1992.
5.2. The Critics

5.2.1 The Critique of Jean-Claude Pressac
Apart from discussing it in reference to the presumed cremation ditches of
“Bunker 2/V,” Pressac also deals with Nyiszli’s testimony in connection with
the technical aspects of the “gassing” procedure in Crematorium II. Introduc-
ing the latter question, Pressac writes (1989, p. 473):
“I have taken from Dr Nyiszli’s book only Chapter Seven, describing the gas-
sing of a convoy at Krematorium II, this being one of the best-known accounts.
Many details can easily be verified using contemporary documents. The de-
scription is entirely accurate, EXCEPT for certain FIGURES which are very
WRONG indeed.”
Despite calling it “entirely accurate,” Pressac nonetheless admits that “the
stark contrast between the general precision of the account and [the] enor-
mous errors that it contains” induced him to check the relevant numbers in the
first Hungarian edition of Nyiszli’s book, since he suspected that the French
translation he was using, that of Tibère Kremer, “must be at fault.” Checking
the Hungarian, however, only confirmed the presence of these “enormous er-
rors” in Nyiszli’s original text (ibid.).401
After comparing Nyiszli’s numbers with the various numbers known or
presumed to be correct by modern historiography, and after identifying “mul-
tipliers” for each (i.e., factors by which Nyiszli’s numbers are exaggerated),
Pressac arrives at the following conclusion at the end of his analysis (ibid., p.
475):
“The average of the different multipliers [is] almost exactly 4. If we apply this
to the official total of 4 million victims we arrive at a figure much closer to re-
ality: 1 million. This calculation is by no means scientific or rigorous, but it
shows that DOCTOR NYISZLI, a respectable ACADEMIC, TRAINED IN
GERMANY, multiplied the figures by FOUR when describing the interior of
Krematorium II and when speaking of the number of persons or victims.”
For Pressac this means that, apart from the “exaggerations,” Nyiszli’s testi-
mony is precise and therefore trustworthy. Nonetheless, Pressac himself iden-
tifies not less than twenty-five “errors” in this one chapter (VII) of Nyiszli’s
book, many of which indeed are not numerical in nature (ibid., pp. 474f.).
In sum, Pressac believes that Nyiszli was “an authentic witness,” some-
thing which, in his opinion, “can easily be proved,” but that “the mystery of
the ‘multiplier’ still remains complete.” A few paragraphs later he adds:
401
All emphases and capitalizations here and below in original unless otherwise noted.
“The case of Dr Miklos NYISZLI’s book is baffling. In my opinion, it contains

the most impressive evocation of the ‘demential nightmare’ experienced by the
thousand men of the Sonderkommando.” (ibid., p. 479)
This is a judgment, at last, with which one can entirely agree, though only on
the condition that one take the expression “demential nightmare” literally.
Pressac holds, incomprehensibly, that Nyiszli really did live in Crematori-
um II (a possibility which is excluded by the series of absurdities proffered by
him in his book on the layout of this building – see Chapter 3.7). In support of
this conviction, Pressac offers a “proof” – even as he acknowledges yet again
that “The problem of the completely false figures in Chapter Seven still re-
mains.” This problem is all the more serious in that, for Pressac, these exag-
gerations or errors apparently could only have been somehow intentional:
“I consider it to be quite impossible that these wrong figures could simply be
‘careless,’ since they are in such stark contrast to the precision and truth of
other passages in the book.” (Ibid.)
But then, why would a “respectable academic” ever have taken recourse to
such silly falsifications?
The proof in question is this: in Chapter XIX of his book, Nyiszli writes of
“the four lightning rods placed at the corners of the crematorium chimney” –
lightning rods which, Pressac notes, also appear in a drawing by David Olère
(ibid.).402 Pressac comments (ibid.):403
“But both [men] commit a slight error.
Photograph PMO neg. no. 20995/507 shows the south side and west end of
Krematorium III with, rising 2 metres above the chimney, four lightning con-
ductors that are not ‘at the four corners’ but in the centre of each of the four
sides of the chimney.[404] Scarcely visible at a distance of 100 metres – the dis-
tance at which the photograph was taken – they become totally invisible be-
yond 200 metres. Only prisoners working within the precincts of Krematorien
II and III could see and remember them. This, admittedly minor, detail could
not be dreamed up.”
This “proof” is rather naive and demonstrates, if anything, the opposite of
what Pressac supposes. The so-called Hauptstrasse or main road which led to
the Birkenau sewage-treatment facility and Zentralsauna passed between the
fences of Crematorium II and III just a few dozen meters from their respective
402
Pressac here quotes from the 1961 English translation of Richard Seaver. The picture by Olère is
reproduced by Pressac on p. 259.
403
PMO neg. no. 20995/507 is reproduced on p. 342 of Pressac’s book.
404
The four lightning rods, in the same position, appear also in photograph PMO neg. no. 20995/506
from January 1943, which shows the southwest side of Crematorium II. The picture is reproduced
twice on pp. 335 and 373 of Pressac’s book, but the image resolution makes them difficult to see
there. Curiously, the picture itself fails to show the presumed Zyklon-B-introduction chimneys on
the roof of Morgue #1; these were, Pressac assures the reader in his notes to the image, “installed
later.”
chimneys. This can be clearly seen in a photograph showing a group of wom-

en and children on this road in front of Crematorium III which was published
in The Auschwitz Album, the French edition of which was co-edited by Pressac
himself (Freyer et al. 1983, Photo 153, p. 177). Anyone who passed along that
road would have been able to see the position of the lightning rods on the
chimneys distinctly. And of course, anyone who found themselves in one of
the courtyards of the crematoria would have seen them still more distinctly.
Now the fact that Nyiszli, who pretended to have lived for six-and-a-half
months in Crematorium II, nonetheless described an erroneous position for the
lightning rods demonstrates, according to Pressac’s logic, that he must have
seen the chimneys of Crematoria II and III from such a distance that he could
not clearly distinguish the position of their lighting rods – in others words, not
from the crematorium courtyard!
The question actually is more complicated still, for in his book Nyiszli
“sees” the lightning rods at the four corners of the chimney on two occasions,
once from outside and once from inside the crematorium courtyard. In fact, of
the two references to them in his book, the first occurs in the context of
Nyiszli’s arrival at Auschwitz, while he is still undergoing selection on the
ramp:
“Until the selection of the group, four thousand people strong, is completed, I
have time to look around myself. In the light of the fading day, the landscape I
saw from inside the wagon now leaps to life. Here there is much more to see.
The first thing that draws my attention – rivets it, so to speak – is a gigantic
es from the top of a factory-like, two-story building, also built of red bricks.
It’s a strange shape for a factory chimney, but what is really impressive is the
column of fire 8-10 meters high which gushes from its mouth between the
lightning rods at its four corners.” (MBV, Chapter I; emphasis added)
The second mention refers to the time of the alleged extermination of the Jews
from Corfu, while Nyiszli was in the courtyard of Crematorium II:
“My glance wanders over the crematorium chimney: the lightning rods placed
at the square chimney’s four corners, all heavy iron rods, have melted from
the terrible fire and are now bent downwards.” (MBV, Chapter XIX; empha-
sis added)
Thus, Pressac’s argument – that “[o]nly prisoners working within the precincts
of Krematorien II and III” could have observed the lightning rods, and thus
that the detail of their existence “could not have been dreamed up” – appears
entirely without foundation. If we are to accept Nyiszli’s testimony here, we
must admit that anyone could in fact have seen the lightning rods from outside
the precincts of the crematoria – from the ramp, for example. Indeed, if any-
thing, the fact that, while clearly knowing of their existence, Nyiszli nonethe-
less got their placement incorrect might even be taken to suggest that he never
got a closer look.
Pressac often reasons, as here, on the basis of a simplistic schematization
which allows for only two possibilities; in fact, there were always multiple
possibilities. In the case at hand, for example, an Arbeitskarte (work card) for
the electricians’ unit (“An die: Elektriker”) has been preserved from the
Auschwitz Central Construction Office, dated October 17, 1942, with the
heading “Lightning conductor for Crematorium n. 11 [sic] BW30 K.G.L.
[Kriegsgefangenenlager; PoW Camp = Birkenau],” which orders “Preparation
and mounting of a four-part lightning conductor on the chimney of Crematori-
um 1 [= II] in the K.G.L.” The work was carried out between October 23 and
27 of the same year.405 A similar Arbeitskarte, dated February 9, 1943, has
been preserved for Crematorium III as well; in its case, the work was executed
on June 21 and 22, 1943.406 Obviously the installers would have known about
the work they had done, and there’s nothing in the documents to suggest that
they were sworn to secrecy on the subject.
Strangely, if typically, Pressac dwells at length over this irrelevant detail
but says nothing at all about the absurdity of Nyiszli’s claim to have seen the
lighting rods melted and bent toward the ground. If nothing else, one wonders
why they would have melted on the night of the Corfu “extermination” but not
on the day of Nyiszli’s arrival, when he allegedly observed “[a] column of fire
8-10 meters high” gushing up from the chimney between them.
5.2.2 The Critique of Charles D. Provan

As I have noted in passing earlier, in 2001 The Journal of Historical Review
published an important article by the late American researcher Charles Provan
titled “New Light on Dr. Miklos Nyiszli and His Auschwitz Book.”
By his own account, Provan began his study hoping to answer “[the] most
radical of the revisionist questions […] Did Dr. Nyiszli even exist?” Having
seen, in an early edition of his book, an image of the cover page of Nyiszli’s
doctoral dissertation, Selbstmordarten auf Grund des Sektionsmaterials des
Breslauer Gerichtsärztlichen Instituts von Juni 1927-Mai 1930 (Types of Sui-
cide on the Basis of Autopsy Materials from the Breslau Forensic Medical In-
stitute, June 1927 to May 1930), Provan decided to obtain a copy of it and
found confirmation there of some of the statements made by Nyiszli in his
book. At the end of the dissertation, Nyiszli expressed his “heartfelt gratitude
to Professor Dr. Reuter and Professor Dr. Strassmann.” In his book, Provan
noted, Nyiszli mentions “[a] Dr. Strasseman [sic]” and writes of having spent
405
RGVA, 502-2-8, pp. 8-8a. Document reproduced in Mattogno 2015c, pp. 127f.
406
RGVA, 502-1-315, pp. 22-22a.
three years “at the Boroslo [sic] Institute of Forensic Medicine” (Provan 2001,
pp. 20-22).
In the interests of truth, one should note that Nyiszli actually does spell
Strassmann correctly in his book; Provan’s use of “sic” here is due to his reli-
ance on the English translation by Richard Seaver, which renders the name in-
correctly. “Boroslo” in turn is Seaver’s attempt to naturalize “Boroszló,” the
Hungarian spelling for Breslau (today, in Polish: Wrocław). The relevant pas-
sages in Nyiszli’s book are as follows:
“Fifteen years earlier the Dean of Medicine of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-
Universität in Breslau had shaken my hand and, wishing me good luck and a
prosperous future, conferred upon me my doctor’s diploma, cum laude.”
(MBV, Chapter II)
“Apart from myself, no one here knows that for three years, working directly
from corpses, I studied every form of suicide as assistant to His Excellency
Professor Dr. Strassmann at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Breslau.
What I knew then, present-day prisoner number A-8450, doctor of the K.Z.,
knows too.” (MBV, Chapter V)
The dissertation furnishes other biographical details about Nyiszli as well. He
was born in Simleul-Silvaniei in Transylvania on June, 1901, and “attended
elementary school for four years and the Humanistic Roman Catholic Episco-
pal Higher Gymnasium”407 in that town (ibid., p. 22). This latter course of
schooling could not have been a common thing for a Jew at the time, and may
help explain the fact, discussed earlier, that he undoubtedly was a very peculi-
ar Jew, if the evidence of his book is to be believed.
Having discussed Nyiszli’s dissertation and other biographical details,
Provan next turns to an analysis and commentary on Nyiszli’s deposition of
July 28, 1945 (ibid., pp. 22f.):
“There are several unmistakable parallels between this document and Dr.
Nyiszli’s later book, but noticeable differences too. Among the parallels were
his selection to perform autopsies by Dr. Mengele, his residence in crematori-
um 1, and his unusual assertion that the victims of the gas chamber at crema-
torium 1 were executed with chlorine granules. ‘The ganuales (sic) fell down
and through contact with the air, a chlorine gas was produced which within
five to ten minutes caused death through agonizing suffocation.’ […]
The differences between Nyiszli’s deposition of 1945 and his subsequent book
are marked, and in some cases irreconcilable. For example, Nyiszli states in
his deposition that he arrived at Auschwitz on May 22, 1944, stayed one day,
and then was transferred to a labor detail in the sub-camp Monowitz. After
about two weeks (thus in June 1944), all doctors with experience in pathology
were asked to report to the authorities. Nyiszli and one other doctor (evidently
a Hungarian who had worked at Strasbourg University) did so, and were tak-
407
The word Gymnasium here is used in the German sense of “university prep high school.”
en to crematorium 1 at Birkenau. After several hours Dr. Mengele appeared,

and examined the two doctors. In Auschwitz,[408] Nyiszli never goes to Mono-
witz; is recruited as a pathologist by Dr. Mengele in May, not June, 1944; and
his fellow pathologist has disappeared!
In his deposition, Nyiszli describes his and the other pathologist’s duties as in-
cluding taking the measurements of abnormal people, who were then shot by a
German officer working for Mengele. The two doctors would then autopsy the
victims, after which they would dissolve the bodies and ship the bones to a re-
nowned anthropological institute in Berlin-Dahlem. On one night, according
to Nyiszli, Mengele ordered the two pathologists to assist him with a group of
fourteen Gypsy twins. Nyiszli, ordered by Mengele, undressed a fourteen-year-
old girl, and placed her on the dissection table, whereupon Mengele gave her
a shot to cause sleep, then killed her with a chloroform injection. She was then
removed to another location. The remaining thirteen twins were one by one
treated in the same manner. When all fourteen twins were dead, Mengele
asked Nyiszli and his colleague how fast they could do the autopsies. They told
him four a day, to which Mengele agreed. Interestingly, and disconcertingly,
this story is omitted from Auschwitz. Dr. Lifton and I believe that it was left
out due to Nyiszli’s admitted involvement in the murders. In the absence of the
threat of his own death, Nyiszli could be considered an accomplice.
Another oddity is this description of cleaning out the crematorium gas cham-
ber: ‘The special command rinsed off the corpses with a water hose and then
began the transport of the corpses in an elevator up to the boiler room.’ Note
that here Nyiszli correctly lists crematorium 1 as having one elevator, not
four, as in his book.
At the end of his 1945 deposition, Nyiszli mentioned that all personnel of the
Sonderkommando were killed on November 17, 1944 – except for the doctors
who worked for Mengele, and their assistants. They were ordered away from
the machine guns by Dr. Mengele himself: he needed their further help for his
racial biology work. In Auschwitz, however, Dr. Mengele saves Nyiszli and
the others on the date of the Auschwitz camp revolt a month earlier, which
goes unmentioned in his deposition.”
As far as the story of the fourteen twins409 is concerned, the hypothesis formu-
lated by Lifton and accepted by Provan – that Nyiszli suppressed it in his book
because it implicated him in Dr. Mengele’s alleged murders – seems rather
dubious.
It is difficult to see in Nyiszli’s behavior in this story a kind of complicity
in murder, especially since the Sonderkommando staff, according to the ortho-
408
Here and elsewhere below Provan uses Auschwitz (italicized in his text, set in roman type in quo-
tations here for contrast) as an abbreviation for the title of Nyiszli’s book, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s
Eyewitness Account in Richard Seaver’s 1960 English translation.
409
The full text of the passage referred to by Provan can be found in the highlighted section in the
translation of Nyiszli’s deposition in Chapter 2.1. Lifton also cites the passage (uncritically) in his
1986 book Nazi Doctors, pp. 350f.
dox narrative, carried out a work of collaboration that was far more compro-
mising, but no one has ever talked about complicity in mass murder in this re-
gard. Of course, Nyiszli could not know back then what the world would
make of the Sonderkommando’s actions, or of his actions, for that matter. But
if Nyiszli had genuinely been concerned about appearing complicit in murder,
he would hardly have included the story of the father and son from Litz-
mannstadt in Chapter XXXI, in which his actions surely must be considered
every bit as compromising: He knowingly misled the pair so as to obtain “in
vivo” observations prior to their murder.
It is strange, on the other hand, that Provan did not notice the blatant con-
tradictions between the story in Nyiszli’s 1946 deposition and the similar story
of the ten twins in Chapter VIII of his book. In it, Nyiszli relates how, while
performing an autopsy on “a pair of twins” as part of a group of “corpses of
gypsy children under ten years of age” which Dr. Mengele had assigned to
him, he observes something unusual:
“In the outer wall of the left ventricle is a tiny, round, pale-red spot, caused by
a pin prick, it barely stands out against the surrounding color. I can’t be
wrong! The pinprick could have been made by a very fine needle. Naturally a
hypodermic needle! The child received an injection, but for what reason?
Someone might receive an injection to the heart in the case of an emergency
due to cardiac insufficiency perhaps. I soon figure it out. I open the heart, ex-
pose the left ventricle. In an autopsy, one would normally ladle out and weigh
the blood in the left ventricle of the heart. That’s not possible to do here, be-
cause the blood has coagulated into a hard, clotted mass. With tweezers I pull
the blood clot apart, sniff it. The characteristic, powerful smell of chloroform
hits my nostrils. The child received a chloroform injection to the heart! For no
other purpose than that the blood in the left ventricle of the heart should coag-
ulate due to the injected chloroform and, depositing against the heart valves,
provoke immediate cardiac arrest.
My knees shake with excitement. I have discovered the Third Reich’s darkest
medical secret. So they kill people here not just with gas, but also with injec-
tions of chloroform administered to the heart! Sweat bathes my forehead. It is
fortunate that I am alone. In front of others I would scarcely have been able to
conceal my emotion. […] If Dr. Mengele were to suspect that I know the secret
of his injections, ten doctors of the political SS would be on hand to witness my
death!” (MBV, Chapter VIII; emphasis added)
Hence, that which, in Nyiszli’s 1945 deposition, Dr. Mengele had openly done
in his presence – injecting chloroform into the heart in order to kill subjects
for autopsy – becomes, in Nyiszli’s 1946 book, the discovery of a dark state
secret on his part – a discovery which Mengele would ineluctably have pun-
ished by the killing of the discoverer!
In the book, Nyiszli thus reveals a simplistic psychology expressed with
tawdry rhetoric: why would someone who had learned the supposed “terrible
secret” of the mass extermination of Jews in gas chambers and nonetheless

been left to live have ever felt the need to worry about the discovery of a few
more killings using chloroform injections to the heart – killings which, in the
“economy” of the Holocaust, would have represented a drop in the ocean?
It’s worth noting here that the substance used for lethal injections accord-
ing to the orthodox Holocaust story was not chloroform but rather phenol. For
example, in its statement of grounds for sentencing at the Frankfurt Auschwitz
Trial on August 19-20, 1965, the court wrote (Rüter 1981, pp. 416):
“Nearly every day in the HKB,[410] among inmates who reported sick and, af-
ter an examination by an inmate physician, were presented to the camp physi-
cian (so-called physician presenters[411]), those whom the camp physician
deemed unfit for work were selected nearly every day. They were subsequently
killed with phenol injections. The number of inmates killed in this way could
not be ascertained. It was, in any event, several thousand.”
Moreover, various order forms for phenol had been taken into evidence previ-
ously as “proofs” of this presumed homicidal practice.
The Auschwitz State Museum is in possession of a photo which depicts a
request for 5 kg of phenol, sent by SS Sanitätsdienstgrad (orderly in the SS
medical service) SS Unterscharführer Josef Klehr to the camp pharmacy
(Apotheke). A syringe was placed on top of the request form, and then the
photograph in question was taken. The caption explains that the two items to-
gether served to administer “lethal injections of phenol” (Długoborski/Piper
2000, Vol. II, p. 324)
The same document (without the syringe, of course) was sent by the Muse-
um to the court in Frankfurt staging the Auschwitz Trial, where it was admit-
ted into evidence as Exhibit No. 127.412
In 1966, Polish researcher Jerzy Frąckiewicz published a letter from the
“Häftlings-K-Bau Golleschau”413 dated February 26, 1943 and directed “to the
pharmacy of Auschwitz CC, Upper Silesia” (“an die Apotheke des K.L.
Auschwitz O/S”) in which, listed among various “materials for dressings and
medicines,” a requested was made as well for “five liters of phenol” (5 Liter
Phenol”; Frąckiewicz 1966, p. 72).
The “evidence” thus is clear: if prisoners were killed by lethal injection at
Auschwitz, the injected poison was phenol. Yet Nyiszli knows nothing of this
pretended use of the chemical for homicidal purposes, and never once men-
tions it.
410
Häftlingskrankenbau, inmate infirmary.
411
Arztvorsteller, that is, those presenting themselves to the physician for examination.
412
Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, attachment 6 to the protocol of the main proceedings of Jan. 28, 1965,
Ref. 4 Ks 2/63, Main Acts, Vol. 107, Document No. 127.
413
“Golleschau Prisoners’ Hospital.” Golleschau (Polish Goleszów) was a sub-camp of Auschwitz
located in the town of the same name some fifty kilometers away near the Czech border.
Provan was so struck by the gross errors contained in Nyiszli’s book that
he even suspected that Nyiszli might not be its author. In particular, he was
troubled by the fact that this “witness” spoke of four elevators in Crematorium
II (Nyiszli’s “Crematorium I”) when, as is well known, there was only ever
one:
“Now, if Nyiszli had actually lived in crematorium 1 at Birkenau, as he claims,
he would have to have known that there was only one elevator.”
Initially Provan thought the problem might be due to a simple error of tran-
scription. The Hungarian text of the passage in question says “Négy nagy te-
herfelvonógép” (four large [freight] elevators), where négy means “four” and
nagy means “large”; perhaps, Provan reasoned, Nyiszli had intended “Nagy
nagy teherfelvonógép” (large, large elevator), but “his transcriber wrote the
similar sounding (in Hungarian), but mistaken, ‘four large elevators’” instead
(2001, p. 22). However, after corresponding with a personal friend of Nyisz-
li’s who claimed to have seen him directly working on the book (that is, with-
out a “transcriber”), Provan later abandoned this hypothesis (ibid.).414 Curi-
ously, however, he failed to draw the obvious conclusion that if Nyiszli knew
in 1945 that Crematorium II had only one elevator, then he must have inten-
tionally lied about that fact in 1946, perhaps in order to make more credible
his claims regarding the transport of 3,000 corpses from the crematorium’s
sub-basement to the cremation hall on the ground floor in a singe day.
In the course of his research, Provan found yet another confirmation of
Nyiszli’s authorship, namely, evidence of Nyiszli’s stay in America in 1939-
1940, of which this passing reference appears in the book:
“My boss, it seems, is pleased. He has a little difficulty reading my block-
capital handwriting. I became accustomed to writing this way in America!”
(MBV, Chapter VIII)
Through the National Archives in Washington, Provan was able to locate
Nyiszli’s information on the passenger list of a ship which arrived in New
York city on December 1, 1939, thus confirming this detail (ibid., p. 23).
Provan also sought to find confirmation of Nyiszli’s activities at Birkenau
in the testimony of other witnesses, and here things become more complicat-
ed.
He turns first to ex-Sonderkommando man Filip Müller who in 1980 wrote
in response to questions from the late Australian revisionist John Bennett:
414
A stronger argument against Provan’s “large, large” hypothesis is easily found in the Hungarian
text itself. Due to a quirk of grammar, nouns are not marked for plurality after a number word in
Hungarian, such that the noun teherfelvonógép remains unchanged whether the phrase is “nagy
teherfelvonógép” (large elevator, singular) or “négy teherfelvonógép” (four elevators, plural).
However, Hungarian does mark plurals in other contexts, and one need only look at the next sen-
tence of Nyiszli’s text to confirm that he does indeed intend a plural here: “They pile the dead on-
to these [ezekre, plural], twenty, twenty-five to an elevator” (MBV, VII, emphasis added). Nyiszli
thus is explicit that there are multiple elevators in the building.
“I got to know Dr. Nyszli [sic] very well in early summer 1944. He had to
work in the Sonderkommando with his colleagues, Prof. Görög and others, as
a pathologist for Dr. Mengele. He was an outstanding and optimistic man … I
never saw Dr. Nyiszli again after the war. He is supposed to have died in
1949–1950.” (Provan 2001, p. 24)
Here arises, however, the non-trivial problem – unacknowledged by Provan –
that in his book of memoirs, published the year before, Müller not only never
mentions Nyiszli, but explicitly asserts that there were only two physicians for
the Sonderkommando, Dr. Pach and Dr. Bendel.
Müller introduces the former with the explanation that he was in charge of
a sort of infirmary for patients from the Sonderkommando in Block 13 of
Camp Sector BIId (Müller 1979a, p. 100):
“In charge of this hospital was Dr Jacques Pach, at that time the only doctor
in the Sonderkommando. A very sensitive and intelligent man of about thirty-
five, Dr Pach had come to Birkenau with a transport from France. His par-
ents, as he told me, had emigrated to France from Poland. […] It was in the
spring of 1943 that Jacques Pach was appointed as doctor in the Sonderkom-
mando.”
Müller devotes the next few pages to a description of Dr. Pach’s activities,
then returns to him later in the book with this additional detail (ibid., p. 238):
“Once Dr Pach’s ward for in-patients had been set up, the treatment of Son-
derkommando out-patients was taken over by Dr Bendel.”
According to Müller’s account (ibid.), this in-patient ward was a new facility
set up in the inmate infirmary in Camp Sector BIIf after the lodgings for the
Sonderkommando were moved from BIId to the crematorium buildings in late
June 1944 – hence after Nyiszli, by his own account, had become the sole
doctor of the Sonderkommando in May 1944. Needless to say, Nyiszli knows
nothing of this change of lodgings; for him, the Sonderkommando had always
lived in the crematoria.
A “Pach Jean” (not Jacques) appears on the list of deportees on transport
number 8 from Angers, France, which departed on July 20, 1942, and arrived
at the camp the next day.415 He was born June 15, 1908 in Bucharest, and thus
it is probable that his family relocated to France from Romania rather than
from Poland.
A Dr. Pach having duties in the camp hospital in BIIf is entirely unknown
in the documentary record. The assertion that a Dr. Pach was part of the
Sonderkommando was made, for the first time perhaps, by Henryk Tauber in
his statement of May 25, 1945, but exclusively in reference to Block XI at the
Auschwitz Main Camp, where the Sonderkommando was originally lodged
before being relocated to Birkenau (Piper 2000, pp. 249f.):
415
Klarsfeld 1978, Liste alphabetique du convoi N° 8.
“Our physician was Pach, a French Jew. He was a talented specialist who
treated SS men and, through their good graces, managed to be transferred out
of the Sonderkommando quarters to another block. When the Politische Abtei-
lung [Political Department = Gestapo] found out about this, he was reassigned
to work in our infirmary despite having spent several months in a free block.”
Tauber thus did not claim that Pach was doctor for the Sonderkommando in
the crematoria in 1944, as maintained by Müller.
In her sworn statement of June 23, 1947, however, Hungarian deportee Ol-
ga Lengyel, who arrived in Birkenau in 1944, declared:
“At Birkenau, an inmate, Dr. Pasche [sic] of France, whom I met while work-
ing in the infirmary, told me that he worked in the gas chamber, and that he
noticed that poison gas used on victims was labeled ‘Cyclone B’ gas which
came from ‘Dessau’ and ‘Tabun’ gas (I am not sure of the spelling) which to
the best of my recollection, came from ‘Dyhernfurt.’ Whether these plants
where Cyclone B and Tabun gas were manufactured were Farben plants, I do
not know. Many people in the underground told me that important people
came from all over Germany to watch the time which was required to put these
people to death by various gasses used.” (NI-11932, pp. 6f.)
This Dr. Pasche thus was part of the Sonderkommando in 1944, and observed
the use in the crematoria of Tabun, a nerve gas which at that time was still one
of Germany’s “secret weapons.” Needless to say, this latter claim forms no
part of the orthodox Holocaust narrative today; curiously, it is also wholly un-
known to Nyiszli, who surely would have added it to his cumulative list of
“types of death” at Auschwitz had he been aware of it. Of course, as we have
noted earlier, Nyiszli also appears to have been wholly unaware of the pres-
ence, in the same buildings with him, performing the same duties, of Dr. Pach
himself!
Returning to Provan’s study of Nyiszli, we are helpfully reminded that
“Müller also testified about Dr. Nyiszli during the 1964 Frankfurt ‘Auschwitz
Trial’” (Provan 2001, p. 24). Indeed, on that occasion Müller declared (Fritz
Bauer…, pp. 20,696-20,699; cf. Langbein 1965, Vol. I, p. 87):
“In 1944, during the Hungarian transports, there were two Hungarian physi-
cians in Crematorium I in a room, pathologists. One of them, if I remember
correctly, was called Dr. Nyiszli, a sturdy man. They had to conduct experi-
ments. And they were often seen also by Dr. Mengele. […] I once saw person-
ally that they put a person who was hunchbacked in a barrel. They put in vari-
ous salts or acids in order to obtain his skeleton. […] And that they took flesh
from people who had been shot there. They had taken it from the thighs and
put it into a large bucket.”
At the time of his deposition at the Auschwitz Garrison Trial (Krakow, No-
vember 25 to December 16, 1947), however, Müller knew nothing of Nyiszli.
He declared then:416
“In the Auschwitz camp, I also saw that the flesh of the non-Jewish detainees
who were shot was used for various purposes. They were often shot in the
presence of Mengele and others, whose names I do not know, and with Aumei-
er and Grabner present as well. Right away, the flesh of their calves would be
put into boxes, and in this way they put aside 6 to 8 boxes of flesh each week.
It sometimes happened that a German delegation arrived with the swastika on
the arm, asking in the presence of Aumeier and Grabner whether there was
any human flesh. Aumeier used to say: ‘We could also use horse meat, but that
would be a waste!’”
He knew nothing of Nyiszli even in 1957 when he wrote a witness account
which first appeared in Czech in a book published in Prague, later translated
into German (Kraus/Kulka 1957, pp. 160-164, here p. 163; 1958, p. 133):
“I did not accept this assignment, and as punishment I was transferred to
Crematorium IV [V]. […] There I was also witness to the the ‘scientific exper-
iments’ of the SS doctors Fischer, Klein and Mengele. They selected from the
transports 100-150 men and women aged 18 to 30 years who were not gassed,
but shot. Immediately after the shootings, they cut the flesh off their thighs and
sent it to the Rajsko Bacteriological Institute, for the cultivation of bacteria.
An SS who was a doctor’s assistant told me this, and added that horse flesh
could also be used for this purpose, but that that would be a shame.”
Note that Müller locates these fables in Crematorium V (not Crematorium II!),
and that he is ignorant of Mengele’s alleged experimentation on twins as well
as his supposed injections to his victims’ hearts with chloroform. He is igno-
rant, thus, not only of Nyiszli himself, but also of the crimes Nyiszli claimed
to have witnessed – crimes which Müller, as a member of the Sonderkomman-
do, surely would have known about.
How then does one explain his mention of Nyiszli at the Frankfurt Ausch-
witz Trial? The answer is simple: just three years prior to his testimony during
the 97th session of the court (October 5, 1964), the Munich weekly Quick
published a German translation of Nyiszli’s book in nine installments (Nyiszli
1961b). Müller clearly read it, for he would plagiarize it shamelessly in his
own book Sonderbehandlung: Drei Jahre in den Krematorien und Gaskam-
mern von Auschwitz in 1979, as I documented a few years later (Mattogno
1986). Unlike in his testimony in 1964, however, Müller never mentions
Nyiszli in his book, presumably to prevent curious readers from discovering
his plagiarism.
416
APMO, Proces załogi (Trial of the Auschwitz camp garrison), Vol. VII, p. 4.
As a final confirmation of Nyiszli’s presence at Auschwitz, Provan calls

upon another self-proclaimed member of the Sonderkommando, Milton Buki,
who allegedly once mentioned a “Dr. Niczly [sic]” as among the doctors who
performed dissections for Mengele, but apart from noting that it was supplied
to him “by a very helpful associate of Dr. Lifton,” Provan indicates neither the
source nor the date of this declaration (2001, p. 25). In any event, the fact is
that in his first known testimony, that of January 4 and 6, 1946 at the Ausch-
witz Garrison Trial,417 Buki never once mentioned Nyiszli.
Finally, Provan appeals to the testimony of a certain “Mrs. Jozsef Szabo, a
Hungarian deported to Auschwitz,” who claimed to have once carried a body
to one of the crematoria together with three companions, one of whom then
recognized “Dr. Nyiszlit Miklos [sic] …from Nagyvara” (2001, p. 25). How-
ever, Provan once again reports neither a source (apart from Dr. Lifton’s
“helpful associate”) nor a date for this statement; it thus is unclear, for exam-
ple, whether it postdates the publication of Nyiszli’s story in the Hungarian
press.
To all this one might add that Nyiszli is not mentioned even in the manu-
scripts written by various Sonderkommando members which are alleged to
have been recovered near the ruins of the crematoria. The problem of “con-
firmation” thus is much more complicated than the simplistic methods adopt-
ed by Provan would imply.
A similar kind of simplistic thinking dogs Provan’s efforts to make sense
of the contradictions of the Nyiszli problem as a whole. In a section headed
“First Appearance of Nyiszli’s Auschwitz Book,” Provan commits a gross
blunder in this regard, writing that he had located “the long-sought original
edition of Nyiszli’s book,” namely, its publication in installments in the news-
paper Vilag (Világ) from February 16 to April 5, 1947, and announcing trium-
phantly: “Its title was: ‘I Was Mengele’s Autopsy Doctor in Auschwitz: A
Hungarian Doctor’s Diary from Hell’” (ibid.). Provan failed to realize that
Nyiszli’s book had already been published in 1946 under essentially the same
(main) title. As we shall see, this serious oversight would soon lead him to
make an even more serious error.
On the basis of the Világ text, Provan explains, he hoped to verify whether
or not the original book did indeed contain the errors pointed out by various
revisionists in the translations available up to that time. Predictably, he finds
confirmation in it of Nyiszli’s “errors” regarding 20,000 cremations per day,
the construction of the crematoria in 1940, the maximum population at
Auschwitz of 500,000 prisoners, the four elevators in Crematorium II, and the
200-meter length of the “undressing room” and the “gas chamber” of that
same building (ibid., pp. 26f.).
417
Jan. 4: APMO, Proces załogi, Vol. 45a, p. 64; Jan. 6: ibid., p. 79.
Provan then seeks to explain all these “errors” with an even greater blunder
of his own. After examining various references to Nyiszli in Világ during and
immediately after the book’s serialization, he writes (ibid., p. 27):
“The next mention of Nyiszli in Vilag, so far as I have been able to ascertain,
came on September 30, 1947, when an article reported on his summons to Nu-
remberg for the trial of IG Farben (case number six before the Nuremberg
Military Tribunal). I regard this article as critical to understanding the true
nature of Dr. Nyiszli’s book on Auschwitz: it provides a solution which makes
sense of all the incorrect information contained therein, and allows Nyiszli’s
other statements to be examined and assessed independently of his book.”
Provan then proceeds to quote the article in question at some length. The key
passage for his argument, however, comes in its first paragraph (ibid., pp. 28):
“Following its serial publication by Vilag, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz dia-
ry has gone all over the world. The extremely interesting novel (again, ‘regé-
ny’ in Hungarian) of experience entitled, ‘I Was Mengele’s Autopsy Doctor’
has been one of the most enduring documents of the German horror.”
After a short digression dealing with issues concerning Nyiszli’s “summons”
to Nuremberg which were raised by the rest of the article, Provan then returns
to this paragraph with emphasis (ibid., p. 29):
“When I read in the September 30, 1947, Vilag article that Miklos Nyiszli’s
book on his experiences at Auschwitz was a novel, it was as if a blindfold had
fallen from my eyes. I had never considered this possibility before, but it cer-
tainly made sense on reading the article. It not only explained the inflated fig-
ures, the factual errors, and the singular account of the Sonderkommandos
(thirteen in all!); it also removed all difficulties of ‘explaining away the de-
tails.’ Auschwitz is a novel. If a character in a novel meets a real personage,
there is no historical issue to resolve. Dr. Nyiszli’s 1945 deposition and his
1947 affidavit disagree with the book on many details because they are re-
cording what he actually thought was the truth, while the book was deliberate-
ly crafted as a historical novel.”
A truly amazing interpretation, whether for its naiveté or its incoherence!
First of all, the article from Világ quoted by Provan does indeed present
Nyiszli’s book as an “élményregény” (“novel of experience,” or more literally,
“experience-novel”), but it does not follow from this that the writer assumed
that the account it contains is fictional, let alone that Nyiszli somehow was
acknowledging as much through the agency of this unknown reporter. The
larger context itself makes this clear: what sense would it have made for the
writer to define Nyiszli’s book as “one of the most enduring documents of the
German horror” if he or she believed it was a simple (i.e., fictional) novel?
That Nyiszli himself insisted on the truth of his account is clear from his
“Declaration” at the beginning of the book itself:
“I, the undersigned Nyiszli Miklós, M.D., ex-prisoner of the K.Z., bearer of
tattoo number A-8450, hereby declare that in the work now published, the cre-
ation of my own hand, a work which contains within it the darkest pages in the
history of humanity, free from all emotion and in strict conformity with the
truth, and without the slightest exaggeration or embellishment, I write as the
direct spectator of, and participant in, the activity of the crematoria and cre-
mation pyres of Auschwitz, into whose flames vanished millions of fathers,
mothers and children.”
Perhaps Provan has forgotten here that he quoted this declaration himself (in
Seaver’s translation) just a few pages earlier: “[…] in accord with reality,
avoiding the smallest exaggeration and embellishment […]” (ibid., p. 26).
Provan certainly also neglects the certainly not-irrelevant fact that the defi-
nition of the book as an élményregény comes not from Nyiszli but from the
Világ reporter, and that two other articles which appeared in Világ on Febru-
ary 14 and 15, 1947 announcing the book’s serial publication, explicitly de-
clared that it was not a novel (“Not a novel!” [Hungarian: “Nem regény!”];
“Dr. Miklos Nyiszli […] did not write a novel” [Hungarian: “nem regényt”]) –
a fact pointed out by Provan himself! (ibid.)
As far as Nyiszli was concerned, his book was indeed “what he actually
thought was the truth,” as is clear from what he has the prosecutor Minskoff
say during his imaginary deposition at the I.G. Farben Trial – namely, that the
book had been examined by “Our experts” and found to be truthful, and thus
accepted as “documentary material” (see Section 2.2.1.). It is evident, thus,
that Nyiszli himself presented his book as an important historical document,
not a novel, and that he expected others to accept it as such – even if the scene
in which this confirmation was (allegedly) given itself is an invention!
Finally, as we have seen above, Nyiszli firmly defended his book against
Rassinier’s criticisms – which certainly were not of a literary character – af-
firming explicitly (see Section 2.3.2.):
“However, I know for sure that anyone can check my writings both in their
medical and technical aspects. There can be found only an image of incor-
ruptible fidelity of the events without any exaggeration and without any pas-
sion, as I have stated it, by the way, in my statement signed with my own
hand.”
Provan’s “novel” interpretation thus appears little more than a banal subter-
fuge in order to obviate, at a stroke, the many grave historiographical and
technical problems with which Nyiszli’s book abounds.
Another grave oversight on Provan’s part is that he limited his search for
references to Nyiszli in Világ to 1947 and thus, shockingly, knew nothing of
the series of twenty-seven articles by Nyiszli himself which appeared in the
paper between April 18 and May 22, 1948 under the title Tanú voltam Nürn-
bergben (I was a witness at Nuremberg). Indeed, he concludes his discussion

of Nyiszli’s involvement in the I.G. Farben trial as follows:
“Although Dr. Nyiszli was summoned to Nuremberg to testify in the I.G. Far-
ben Trial, he was not called to the stand. To explain this, Provan posits that
Nyiszli, having been at Monowitz for only about two weeks, could provide little
in the way of useful evidence. At some point in the trial, he was allowed to re-
turn home to Romania.” (Provan 2001, p. 29)
Because he knows nothing of the fake “testimony” which Nyiszli later pub-
lished in Világ – in which Nyiszli recounts, in detail, his “experiences” on the
stand at the trial – Provan fails to comprehend the full significance of these
facts, and thus fails to draw the inevitable conclusion that Nyiszli was a fraud
of unequaled impudence – or alternatively a psychopath who delivered his
“testimony” in a state of hallucination.
Hence, Nyiszli was either an extraordinary impostor or a lunatic; there is
no escaping from the dilemma. And both horns of this dilemma – shameless
mendacity or lunacy – disqualify Nyiszli and completely destroy his credibil-
ity.
Provan concludes his study with the following observations (ibid.):
“Within a few years of Vilag’s admission that the book was a novel, it was
translated into French and German, and English, and wrongly declared to be
an authentic history. This untruth aroused a storm of criticism, starting with
the founder of Holocaust revisionism, Paul Rassinier, who himself had been a
prisoner of the German concentration camp system for helping Jews under
Nazi domination. While Rassinier’s questions were justifiable on many points,
they are moot, because Dr. Nyiszli’s published treatment of Auschwitz was
knowingly written as historical fiction, which accounts for its disconcerting
mixture of truth and non-truth.
Thus the revisionists, although sometimes off course, were correct all along in
concluding that there were serious problems with Auschwitz. For example
Carlo Mattogno’s critique, Medico ad Auschwitz: Anatomia di un falso, is a
wonderful treatment, exhaustive and extremely thorough. Meanwhile, the de-
fenders, translators, and publishers of the Nyiszli book have dealt with the re-
visionists’ criticisms with silence, or by deliberately changing sections of
Nyiszli’s novel without advertising that. What is needed now is an annotated
edition of the original book, along with a complete collection of Dr. Nyiszli’s
writings and testimony on Auschwitz, to clear the air on this long-standing
problem.”
Given that, according to Nyiszli’s own repeated declarations, his 1946 book
was not a novel but rather a historical account written “in strict conformity
with the truth, and without the slightest exaggeration or embellishment,”
Provan’s risible attempt to explain it away as a conscious fiction dissolves
completely, and all the many problems which it raises, recognized (if only in
minimal part) by Provan himself, remain intact.
The annotated edition and collection which Provan called for has now finally
arrived, but its effect is to have “cleared the field” of a false testimony which
has been taken seriously for much too long.
Appendix
Dr. Mengele’s “Medical Experiments” on Twins

in the Birkenau Gypsy Camp
In 1997, Helena Kubica, researcher at the Auschwitz Museum, published a
long German article titled “Dr. Mengele and His Crimes in the Auschwitz-
Birkenau Concentration Camp” (“Dr. Mengele und seine Verbrechen im Kon-
zentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau”).418 The author sifted through numerous
documents on Dr. Mengele’s activities at Birkenau preserved in the archives
of the Museum in search of documentary proof of his presumed criminal med-
ical experiments on twins. The situation is as follows.
Dr. Josef Mengele entered service at Auschwitz on May 30, 1943. His di-
rect superior, SS Garrison Physician (SS-Standortarzt) Dr. Eduard Wirths, ap-
pointed him Camp Doctor (Lagerarzt) at the so-called Gypsy Family Camp
(Zigeunerfamilienlager), located in Sector BIIe of the Birkenau Camp (p.
376).
Mengele was particularly interested in the study of twins, especially identi-
cal twins, organizing a daycare center solely for this purpose (p. 381):
“In the gypsy camp, he caused Barracks 29 and 31 and a nursery – a sort of
daycare center and pre-school – to house not only the children under his ob-
servation (these lived in Barracks 31), but all gypsy children up to 6 years of
age.
A total of several hundred children were housed in the nursery school from 8
to 14 years of age, where they were supervised by many prisoners. […] The
barracks used as a nursery school were in slightly better condition than the
others, entirely plastered on the inside, decorated with colored images repre-
senting fairy tales. For a short time, the children who lived there received a
better diet – milk, butter, white bread, vegetables and meat broth concentrates,
even marmalade and chocolate […].
The area behind Barracks 31 was enclosed and a playground was installed,
with sandboxes, carousel, swings and gymnastic equipment.”
Naturally, for Kubica, all this was intended solely for “propaganda purposes”
(ibid.). We need only inquire, however, for whom this alleged propaganda was
intended, since not even the delegate from the Red Cross who visited Ausch-
witz in September 1944 was permitted to visit the Birkenau Camp (Comité in-
ternational… 1946, pp. 91f.).
And how about the diet, incredibly rich for a concentration camp – as con-
firmed by former inmate Anna Lipka (p. 389) – was this also solely intended
for “propaganda purposes”?
Translated by Carlos W. Porter. An earlier version of this article appeared as Mattogno 2008.
418
Kubica 1997; all subsequent page numbers from there, unless stated otherwise.
This scene is not easy to reconcile with the unprecedented crimes attributed
to Dr. Mengele, but Kubica has decisive “proof” to hand.
An epidemic of noma faciei, a gangrenous illness affecting mostly chil-
dren, broke out in the Zigeunerlager in the summer of 1943. The patients were
transferred on Dr. Mengele’s order to an isolated barracks in the hospital of
the Gypsy Camp and, we are assured by Kubica,
“many of the sick children were killed, always by order of Dr. Mengele, and
their bodies were taken to the institute of hygiene of the Waffen-SS at Rajsko
for histopathological research. There, preparations of the individual organs
were prepared and preserved in glass, even including the entire head of a
child, among others, for the SS academy of medicine in Graz.” (p. 379)
We learn from the pertinent footnote that the entire story is based exclusively
on post-war testimonies. In this context, the author mentions a single docu-
ment that she reproduces on p. 394, here reproduced in Illustration 3. The
document is a bill of lading to the Institute of Hygiene of the Waffen-SS (SS-
Hygiene-Institut) of Rajsko, Hygiene and Bacteriology Section, relating to the
“head of a corpse” (“Kopf einer Leiche”) taken from a “12-year old child”
(“12-jähriges Kind”). Nothing is known of the child’s cause of death; the only
thing that is certain is that the request for histological examination originated
from the H-Krankenbau Zigeunerlager Auschwitz II, BIIe, that is, the prisoner
hospital of the Gypsy Camp. The explanation advanced by Kubica is clearly
specious. Noma faciei (or cancrum oris) is a disease which destroys the orofa-
cial tissues. It currently strikes chiefly sub-Saharan African children between
the ages of 2 and 16; in the absence of adequate treatment, the mortality rate
ranges between 70 and 90% (see Enwonwu et al. 1999). One may therefore
reasonably suppose that, at Birkenau during the years 1943-1944, the mortali-
ty rate of young gypsy children stricken with noma was even higher. In 1943,
2,587 children below the age of 10 died in the Gypsy Camp,419 including prac-
tically all those suffering from noma.
But then, why would it have been necessary to kill children who were al-
most certainly dying of disease anyway?
The obvious response to this rhetorical question is supplied by Kubica her-
self by citing the testimony of Dr. Jan Čespiva, who had worked as a physi-
cian in the Gypsy Camp’s infirmary (p. 379):
“There was an outbreak of noma. Entire pieces of flesh fell off due to this; the
lower jaw was affected as well. I had never seen gangrene of the face like that.
The crania of the children were prepared for the SS Academy at Graz. I know
this because we wrote the address. The heads were preserved in benzene for-
maldehyde, the bodies [were cremated] in Crematorium III.”
419
Thomas Grotus, Jan Parcer, “EDV-gestützte Auswertung der Sterbeeinträge,” in: Staatliches Mu-
seum… 1995, p. 248.
Illustration 3: A bill of lading to the Institute of Hygiene of the Waffen-SS (SS-

Hygiene-Institut) of Rajsko, Hygiene and Bacteriology Section, relating to the “head of
a corpse” taken from a “12-year old child.”
It is therefore obvious that the child in question died of noma, and that the
German physicians hoped to find a cure by studying the heads of children who
had died of this disease.
This request for histological examination is the only documentary “proof”
of Dr. Mengele’s “crimes” to be found in the archive of the Auschwitz Muse-
um! Not much for the so-called “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz, and Kubica,
apparently aware of this, as a last resort quotes the “eyewitness” Miklós
Nyiszli, who becomes thus equally crucial to her.
After creating the school already mentioned above, Dr. Mengele created an
“experimental laboratory,” which became the center where the “camp research
in the field of twin births and congenital anomalies” was performed (p. 380) –
hence, the ogre’s lair. As head of this center Dr. Mengele appointed Dr. Ber-
told Epstein from Prague. His assistant was another Czech physician, Dr. Ru-
dolf Weisskopf (Vitek; p. 379). Two camp inmates also worked in Dr.
Mengele’s laboratory: a Polish anthropology Ph.D., Martyna Puzina (p. 390),
and the Czech painter Dinah Gottliebová, who produced drawings of the parts
of the body of the children under examination (p. 396).
The activities of this “experimental laboratory” are well documented (p.
397):
“The archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum contain numerous docu-

ments signed by Dr. Mengele, such as requests for analysis by the Institute of
Hygiene.”
Yet no document attests to Dr. Mengele’s presumed crimes. This is not at all
surprising, considering the activities performed in his laboratory (p. 390):
“As shown by reports of inmates who performed tasks in the twins’ block, as
well as reports from the twins themselves, the individual pairs of twins were
subjected by Dr. Mengele to research of any kind, which constituted the start-
ing point for the performance of the most varied types of experiments on the
same. In general, they were subjected to anthropometric, morphological, psy-
chiatric and radiological research. The anthropological research was initially
performed in Dr. Mengele’s laboratory in the sauna of the Gypsy Camp. In
November 1944, this laboratory was transferred to Barracks 15, in the area of
the men’s hospital sector (BIIf). Every individual part of the body of the per-
sons subjected to examination was measured in the most accurate manner: the
twins were measured in pairs, comparing the results. The documentation con-
tained annotations of the shape of the mouth, the nose, the muscles of the ears,
the color of the eyes and skin of the individual parts of the body.
There was no criminal activity, therefore, and it is easy to see what M. Puzyna
and D. Gottliebová’s tasks consisted of: anthropometrical studies and anatom-
ical drawings.
Kubica adds (p. 403):
“All the documentation, that is, photographs, drawings, descriptions and ana-
lytical results, were preserved in individual folders for every person exam-
ined,”
and she published a few of these documents. Notwithstanding this abundant
documentation, Kubica notes (p. 382):
“Nevertheless, unfortunately, it has not been possible to find any document
showing how many gypsy twins passed through Dr. Mengele’s laboratory.”
But a few pages later, the Polish researcher states (p. 387):
“The Archives of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau also contain a doc-
ument which contains personal data and copies of anthropological studies on
295 inmates – Greek, Hungarian, Dutch, French and Italian Jews – upon
whom Mengele performed experiments. This list also contains the names of
117 Hungarian Jewish pairs of twins in the women’s sector of the camp. As for
male twins from Barracks 15 of Camp BIIf, we know from the report on one
pair of twins that there were 107 of them, aged from age 4 to 60.”
Thus, the total number of documented twins available to Dr. Mengele
amounted to between 402 and 412. What happened to them?
A series of daily reports, not mentioned by Kubica, although they can be
found precisely in the Auschwitz Museum’s archives, the Arbeitseinsatz (la-
bor deployment) reports of the men’s

camp at Birkenau,420 contain the heading
“twins for experimental purposes”
(“Zwillinge für Versuchzwecke”) starting
from July 28 up to October 3, 1944 (the
reports are complete only for the month
of August). In the 35 reports which are
preserved, the number of these inmates
never varies: it always is 49. This ab-
sence of variation over a period of more
than three months allows us to rule out
any continual replacement of “guinea
pigs”, and is fully compatible with the
“anthropometric, morphological, psy- Illustration 4: Josef Mengele (1911-
chiatric and radiological examinations” 1979), German physician and SS
Hauptsturmführer. Photo taken by a
mentioned earlier. police photographer in 1956 in Bue-
Kubica, by contrast, claims that the nos Aires for Mengele’s Argentine
fate of these twins was quite a different identification document
one (p. 404):
“The last stop in the search for several pairs of twins or individual persons
was the analysis of the individual organs of the body during the autopsy. To
this end, these persons were killed at Dr. Mengele’s order or by Dr. Mengele
himself, by an injection of phenol into the heart. The bodies were taken to the
dissecting room.”
At this point, the Polish researcher unveils her “crucial witness”: none other
than Miklós Nyiszli! The entire story about Dr. Mengele’s “crimes” originates
from the ravings of this mythomaniac.
Notwithstanding the absurd lies he told, Nyiszli is nonetheless held in high
esteem by orthodox historiography, but, in a sort of veiled schizophrenia, only
as regards his accusations against Dr. Mengele. And in fact, his testimony
constitutes the “demonstrative” framework for the accusations of every book
on the subject, starting with the book by Posner/Ware on Dr. Mengele (1986),
one of the most important, which is also mentioned by Kubica. The two au-
thors cite Nyiszli on their pages 19, 20, 26, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 53 and 152.
In fact, the entire chapter on the “crimes” of Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz is built
upon Nyiszli’s “testimony”! Even Robert Jay Lifton mentions him repeated-
ly.421 Kubica cites him just as often. She even reproduces his photograph (p.
385) and cites him several times (pp. 378, 384, 404, 405, 408).
That Mengele’s research did not involve the killing of twins was confirmed
by Ernst Spiegel, who was deported to Auschwitz from Hungary in April 1944
420
APMO, D-AuI-3/1; D-AuII-3a/16; D-AuII-3a/25-49.
421
Lifton 1986, pp. 257, 350-351, 358-364, 366-368, 370, 378, 458; notes: pp. 522f., 527-529, 533.
with his twin sister, and was assigned to the Twin Block precisely in this ca-
pacity, where he had to supervise about 80 children:422
“I had to see to it, that they were brought to ‘His Majesty Mengele.’ They per-
formed experiments on us.”
In this regard he specified:
„The experiments were carried out in the Gypsy Camp or rather the Gypsy
Block. I was present as an interpreter. I know nothing about twins having been
shot and dissected during that time. I know nothing about that.”
Dr. Mengele’s “crimes” are not only not attested to by one single document,
they are even overtly refuted by absolutely indisputable facts. In his descrip-
tion of the first autopsy allegedly performed by him on a pair of twins, Nyiszli
wrote:
“My knees shake with excitement. I have discovered the Third Reich’s darkest
medical secret. So they kill people here not just with gas, but also with injec-
tions of chloroform administered to the heart!” (MBV, Chapter VIII)
If this had been true, Dr. Mengele would have proceeded to liquidate all the
witnesses of his alleged criminal activity – his collaborators who also worked
with twins – before leaving Auschwitz on 17 January 1945. He certainly had
enough time to do it! But he allowed all the “eyewitnesses” of his alleged
crimes to survive, to wit:
– Dr. Bertold Epstein, one of the signers of the famous appeal by former
Auschwitz inmates dated 4 March 1945;423
– Dr. Rudolf Weisskopf, liberated from Bergen-Belsen (Kárný 1995, Vol. I,
p. 333);
– Martyna Puzyna, interviewed by Posner and Ware in June 1985 (Pos-
ner/Ware, p. 329);
– Dinah Gottliebová, who moved to the USA in 1947, where she lived until
July 29, 2009;424
– Miklós Nyiszli, the purported crucial “witness”, who, in his capacity as the
physician of the so-called “Sonderkommando” at the crematoria, at the
same time also would have been a keeper of the “terrible secret” of the
mass gassings, as we have seen in the present study, was also quietly left
alive!
But what about the twins? What happened to the victims of Dr. Mengele’s ex-
periments? Were they all killed en masse? Quite the contrary!
422
YVA, P.25-19. As a side note, according to an interview allegedly granted to Hubert Lassier and
published by the weekly Oggi, Mengele reportedly said: “I never executed any twins specifically
to be able to do experiments.” (Lassier 1983). The contents of many declarations by, or attributed
to, Mengele are, however, clearly false, so that this source is without doubt spurious.
423
“An die internationale Öffentlichkeit, Auschwitz, den 4. März 1945.“ GARF, 7021-108-46, p. 11,
with handwritten signature of B. Epstein.
424
After the war she went to Paris, where she married Art Babbitt in 1949 (artist’s name of Arthur
Harold Babitsky); see Lentz 2010, p. 24.
Kubica informs us that, in 1984, these twins were still numerous enough to
form their own association (p. 429):
“In 1984, the victims of Dr. Mengele’s experiments, who had lived in the chil-
dren’s camp, formed the organization Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab
Experiment Survivors (CANDLES), with the self-appointed task of document-
ing Mengele’s crimes, informing the world, capturing the ‘Angel of Death’ and
dragging him before a court”
The Website of the association lists almost 400 twins from Auschwitz.425 Ku-
bica also presents a list of twins from Auschwitz, consisting of over 320
names (pp. 437-455). The great majority of them were twins, but some were
merely siblings, such as the sisters Tatiana Liliana and Alessandra Bucci. Both
were deported to Auschwitz on March 29, 1943. The first, born on September
19, 1937, was registered under number 76484; the second, born July 1, 1939,
was registered under number 76483 (Picciotto 1995, p. 157). Luigi Ferri, born
on September 9, 1932, was deported in August 1944 and registered under
number B-7525 (ibid., p. 266). Sergio de Simone, born at Naples on Novem-
ber 29, 1937, was deported to Auschwitz on March 29, 1944, at the age of
nearly seven years, and registered under number 179614 (ibid, p. 217).
No orthodox historian has yet succeeded in explaining why these children
were not gassed immediately upon arrival. In reality, this is not so surprising,
because on January 16, 1945, in just the men’s camp at Birkenau, there were
770 “adolescents aged up to 18 years” (“Jugendliche bis 18. Jhr.”), in addition
to 400 invalids (“Invaliden”)!426 When the Soviets arrived, there were still 205
children at Birkenau, from just a few months up to 15 years of age, many of
them twins (see Table 1).
The three documents mentioned above, the list of the CANDLES organiza-
tion, the list compiled by Kubica and the Soviet list of 1945, in addition to the
Soviet list of inmates liberated at Birkenau,427 permit the compilation of a list
of 543 twins having passed through Auschwitz (see Table 2). Of these, 376
survived until the liberation of the camp; four died in the following months,
one died on the evacuation transport on January 27, 1945, and twelve perished
during the existence of the camp. Nothing is known of the remaining 154.
In just three cases, Kubica notes: “died [not: killed] in the camp as a result
of the experiments performed [on them]” (“Starb im Lager infolge der durch-
geführten Experimente”; pp. 442, 449, 451), so that these three would seem to
constitute Dr. Mengele’s victims. It goes without saying that such an assump-
tion is in no way backed up by proof of Mengele’s personal complicity.
***
425
The list may be consulted at: https://candlesholocaustmuseum.org/learn/twins-found-by-
candles.html (last accessed on Jan 21, 2018).
426
“Arbeitseinsatz für den 16. Januar 1945.” RGVA, 502-1-67, p. 17a.
427
GARF, 7021-108-23.
In conclusion, the known facts are as follows:

Dr. Mengele’s alleged crimes are not substantiated by any document. No
document shows that Mengele ever killed even one single child, or that one
single child was ever killed on his orders. The crucial and sole witness, the
one upon whose testimony the whole accusation is based, was an extraordinar-
ily imaginative impostor. Dr. Mengele’s closest collaborators, including this
presumed crucial witness, and at least 543 of his “victims” were allowed to
live. But then, how could anyone seriously believe in the fable of the “Angel
of Death” of Auschwitz?
Tables
Table 1: Name Table of Children Found by the Soviets at Birkenau428
Natio- Country of Arrival at
Reg. No. Last Name Given Name Sex Age
nality Origin Auschwitz
? ? V.L. M 10 Polish 12 Aug. 1944
78254 Abrahamson Helli F 10 Jewish Holland June 1944
A-7739 Adler Mano M 12 Jewish Hungary May 1944
A-26885 Ajzenberg J.I. F 8 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
? Altmann B. F 3 German June 1944
B-5405 Apelbaum Edek M 8 Jewish Poland July 1944
B-5406 Apelbaum Milek M 8 Jewish Poland July 1944
? Bauer Sary F 15 Hungary July 1944
A-26857 Beer Pawlonna F 8 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
? Bein Piroska F 15 Block 10 Hungary ?
A-25981 Benger Eva F 13 Jewish Hungary 3 Nov. 1944
B-2780 Bierman Ephraim M 14 Jewish Poland 2 Jul. 1944
B-14006 Binet Robert M 5 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
B-14005 Binet Gaspar M 6 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-20851 Binet Martha F 3 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-7199 Bleier Edit F 9 Jewish Hungary July 1944
A-12080 Bleier Ernö M 9 Jewish Hungary July 1944
B-14615 Bleier Istvan M 14 Jewish Hungary Early July 1944
B-13979 Blum Palko M 6 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-26847 Blum Vera F 11 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
n/a Bodanska H.G. F 6½ Polish born in camp
? Borowski J.V. M 3 Polish 12 Oct. 1944
B-14003 Braun Peter M 10m Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-26840 Braun Judith F 11 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
76484 Buci429 Liana F 7 Jewish Italy June 1944
76483 Buci430 Andrea M 7 Jewish Italy June 1944
B-13986 Burger Franz M 6 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
B-13987 Burger Thomas M 11 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-7057 Čengeri L.F. F 7 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
A-7058 Čengeri J.T. F 7 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
A-7264 Chybik Ilse F 14 Jewish Austria 28 Jun. 1944
? Cinsk Jurek M 6 Poland ?
A-9746 German Marta F 14 Jewish Hungary 10 Jun. 1944
A-9745 German Katalin F 14 Jewish Hungary 10 Jun. 1944
A-26877 Diamant Eva F 12 Jewish Hungary 2 Nov. 1944
192752 Donten A.R. M 5 Polish 12 Aug. 1944
85386 Donten Vaclava F 13 Polish 12 Oct. 1944
A-8737 Echstein (Eckstein) Ilona F 9 Jewish Hungary July 1944
A-8738 Echstein (Eckstein) Vera F 9 Jewish Hungary July 1944
? Einesman Roza F 12 ? Poland August 1944
? Eisenberg Judit F 9 ? Czechosl. Sep. 1944
B-14706 Epstein H.M. M 14¾ Jewish Hungary June 1944
? Epstein Jamas M 15 Block 18 Hungary
A-7060 Fekete Orla F 7 Jewish Hungary June 1944
428
GARF, 7021-108-23, pp. 179-198, 200-217.
429
Bucci Tatiana Liliana.
430
Bucci Alessandra.

A-12089 Fekete Vilmos M 7 Jewish Hungary June 1944
A-26919 Feldbaum Marianne F 13 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-7525 Ferri Luigi M 12 Jewish Italy August 1944
A-782 Fischer Georg M 9 Jewish Czechosl. May 1944
A-781 Fischer Josef M 9 Jewish Czechosl. May 1944
A-27789 Frei Rozsi F 14 Jewish Hungary 10 Jun. 1944
A-24977 Friedler Boleslaw M 13 Jewish Poland 6 Aug. 1944
B-14058 Fuchs Arpad M 10 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-15981 Fürst Erika F 13 Jewish Yugoslavia 21 May 1944
? Geiger Laura F 12 Jewish Poland August 1944
? Ginter Genjek M 6 ? Poland ?
A-13203 Goldental Sandor M 10 Jewish Hungary 5 Jun. 1944
A-13202 Goldental Ernö M 10 Jewish Hungary 5 Jun. 1944
A-7205 Goldental Manka F 3 Jewish Hungary 5 Jun. 1944
A-27632 Grinspan Ruth F 7½ Jewish Poland 27 Jul. 1944
A-27633 Grossmann Paula F 6 Jewish Poland 27 Jul. 1944
A-26945 Grossmann Olga F 6½ Jewish Slovakia 4 Nov. 1944
A-26946 Grossmann V.J. F 6½ Jewish Slovakia 4 Nov. 1944
A-26942 Grünbaum Alice F 11 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-12958 Grünfeld M. F. 14 Jewish Romania May 1944
192812 Gunsky Richard M 6 Polish ? 12 Aug. 1944
? Gutenberg V.J. F 9 Jewish Poland October 1944
190691 Gutmann Rene M 6 Jewish Czechosl. May 1944
A-17546 Hadl Paul M 7 Jewish Hungary 11 Jun. 1944
A-17545 Hadl Gyuri M 7 Jewish Hungary 11 Jun. 1944
A-9754 Hadl Eva F 13 Jewish Hungary 11 Jun. 1944
B-14095 Hajman J. M 4 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
? Halpern Gabriel M 15 ? Poland June 1944
B-14101 Hamburger Julius M 6 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-26959 Hecht Eva F 2 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-5142 Helenka ? F 2½ Jewish ? ?
A-27638 Hellstein Fella F 6 Jewish Poland 27 Jul. 1944
A-7222 Hermann Piroska F 13 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
A-2723 Hermann Ibolya F 13 Jewish Hungary 2 Nov. 1944
A-27681 Herskovic Marta F 14 Jewish Slovakia 15 May 1944
? Hochstein Paul M 5 ? Poland Feb. 1944
A-19999 Hochstein S.D. M 4¾ Jewish Hungary July 1944
A-26974 Hojman Enka F 8m Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-6373 Holländer Anna F 13 Jewish Hungary May 1944
193985 Hutnik S.S. M 13 Polish ? 12 Oct. 1944
188930 Jakobson Heinz M 8 Jewish Holland June 1944
? Jaksa-Bykonski Hania F 10 Polish ? 12 Aug. 1944
B-14381 Jung ? M 4 Jewish Slovakia Nov. 1944
? Kaff Vera F 15 Block 25 Czechosl. May 1944
? Kaff Mira F 15 Block 25 Czechosl. May 1944
188926 Kanel Johann M 6 Jewish Holland 6 Jun. 1944
A-27643 Kaplon Irene F 14 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
192813 Kapusta H.J. M 5 Polish ? 12 Aug. 1944
192893 Karpa H.J. M 9 Polish ? 12 Oct. 1944
B-14105 Keller Ernst M 8 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-7213 Klein Anna F 11 Jewish Hungary mid-June 1944
A-7214 Klein Judit F 11 Jewish Hungary mid-June 1944

A-6471 Klein Agnes F 14 Jewish Hungary May 1944
? Klein Gyorgy M 15 Block 18 Hungary
A-2459 Kleinmann Josef M 4¾ Jewish Czechosl. May 1944
A-19997 Klüger Paul M 9½ Jewish Poland 23 Jul. 1944
B-14132 Kohn M.L. M 6 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-5139 Kohn Klara F 5 Jewish Hungary 12 May 1944
A-5138 Kohn E.K. F 4 Jewish Hungary 12 May 1944
B-14156 Krasnianski Iwan M 10 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-26195 Kufler Yena F 10 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
85759 Kurska Kalina F 6 Polish Poland 13 Aug. 1944
B-7636 Lederer Franz M 14 Jewish Czechosl. 14 Aug. 1944
B-14182 Lewinger Peter M 5 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
? Lieberman Tibor M 15 Block 18 Hungary ?
? Liechtenstern Kurt M 15 Block 20 Czechosl. June 1943
? Löbl Robert M 15 Block 28 Hungary January 1944
A-12090 Lörinczi A.A. M 10 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
A-7059 Lörinczi L.A. F 10 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
A-5123 Lustig-Brawer Judit F 2 Jewish Hungary 22 May 1944
A-5121 Lustig-Brawer A.A. F 2 Jewish Hungary 22 May 1944
A-5131 Malek Judit F 14 Jewish Hungary May 1944
A-7738 Malek Jakob M 3 Jewish Hungary May 1944
A-7737 Malek Elias M 3 Jewish Hungary May 1944
? Malek Judit F 15 Jewish Hungary May 1944
? Malek Salomon M 15 Jewish Hungary May 1944
A-27165 Mangel Gertrud. F 12 Jewish Hungary 3 Nov. 1944
A-3638 Marmorstein Valeria F 11 Jewish Hungary 20 May 1944
A-3637 Marmorstein Marta F 11 Jewish Hungary 20 May 1944
? Maslow A.Ja. M Russian ?
A-9841 Mejer Laure F 13 Jewish Hungary 17 May 1944
A-1386 Mejer Mozes M 13 Jewish Hungary 17 May 1944
183959 Michuk Tolla M Russian ?
? Modiano Samo M 15 Block 18 Italy August 1944
77357 Morosaw Taissa F 2½ Russian April 1944
A-7064 Moses Miriam F 11 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
A-7063 Moses Eva F 11 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
? Mucha Jeslav M 9 Polish August 1944
A-27063 Neumann Henia F 13 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
B-14206 Neumann Gabriel J. M 8 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
B-14213 Neumann G.L. M 9 Jewish Hungary 2 Nov. 1944
188931 Noach Haskel M 10 Jewish Holland 6 Jun. 1944
78482 Noach R.A. F 13 Jewish Holland 6 Jun. 1944
? Orovicz Rischek M 5 ? Poland ?
77370 Pasankova (Michuk) Sina F 3 Russian ? ?
A-1437 Peterfreund J.S. M 12 Jewish Hungary June 1944
A-3630 Peterfreund A.S. F 12 Jewish Hungary June 1944
? Pflanzen Linka F 5 ? Poland Feb. 44
183970 Plawinski Alik M 4 ? Witebsk 15 Apr. 1943
B-1153 Pritichy Alex M 7 Jewish Lodz/Poland August 1944
A-5602 Rajngevic431 C.M. F 14 Jewish France 28 May 1944
A-3039 Reichmann432 Friedel F 9 Jewish Belgium 21 May 1944
431
Rajngevic Cecilie, born on Jan. 22, 1931. Klarsfeld 1978, Transport No.74 of May 20, 1944.

A-10440 Reinitz Georg M 12 Jewish Hungary 28 May 1944
B-14245 Rochlitz Alfred M 10 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
84831 Ronbacha Danuta F 13 Polish ? 13 Aug. 1944
A-7054 Rosenbaum Ruth F 10 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
A-7055 Rosenbaum Judit F 10 Jewish Hungary 2 Jun. 1944
? Rosenberg Ruth F 11 Jewish Hungary June 1944
? Rosenblum Hana F 12 Poland August 1944
B-2784 Rosenwasser Lea F 12 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
B-14232 Rosenwasser Josef M 8 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
B-14820 Rosenzweig Jurek M 12 Jewish Lodz/Poland August 1944
A-27087 Rukovic Erika F 3 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-10 Salomon Sarolta F 9 Jewish Hungary 21 May 1944
A-11 Salomon Rozalia F 9 Jewish Hungary 21 May 1944
A-5128 Sattler Vera F 12 Jewish Hungary 17 May 1944
A-5129 Sattler Magda F 12 Jewish Hungary May 1944
A-9272 Sauer Margit F 14 Jewish Hungary mid-June 1944
A-9271 Sauer Sara F 14 Jewish Hungary mid-June 1944
179963 Sawojlo A.I. M 10m Russian born in camp
A-27153 Schick Eva F 13 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
81753 Schlager Laura F 9 Jewish Holland June 1944
188932 Schlager J.D. M 11 Jewish Holland June 1944
B-14324 Schlesinger Pavel M 6 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
B-14325 Schlesinger Robert M 11 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
A-7254 Schlesinger Martha F 12 Jewish Hungary 15 Jun. 1944
A-7255 Schlesinger Judith F 12 Jewish Hungary 15 Jun. 1944
? Schlesinger Sidonia F 14 Hungary
? Schuldenfrei Moritz M 11 Block 18 Belgium April 1944
(Mendel)
A-18951 Schwarcz Vera F 13½ Jewish Slovakia 16 Jun. 1944
Schwartz Tamas M 12 ? Czechosl. August 1944
B-14295 Schwarz Ferenc M 11 Jewish Slovakia 4 Nov. 1944
? Schwarz Iren F 12 ? Hungary May 1944
? Schweid Andor M 15 Block 9 Hungary ?
? Selmanovic Mor M 14 ? Hungary May 1944
77303 Sluschakova Wala F 3-4 ? Witebsk April 1944
A-27880 Spiro Dora F 9 Jewish Poland 27 Jul. 1944
A-23221 Spirova Frida F 9 Jewish Slovakia 12 Nov. 1944
A-27712 Stein Judith F 14 Jewish Hungary May 1944
B-14566 Steiner Jindrich M 14 Jewish Slovakia 30 Sep. 1944
? Steiner Zdenek M 15 ? Czechosl. Sep. 1943
? Steiner Jiri M 15 ? Czechosl. Sep. 1943
81769 Stockfisch Hariette F 3 Jewish Holland June 1944
A-27126 Strauss Gitta F 10 Jewish Slovakia 4 Nov. 1944
A-27127 Strauss Lilly F 12 Jewish Slovakia 4 Nov. 1944
B-14272 Strauss D.J. M 8 Jewish Slovakia 4 Nov. 1944
? Stroch Jakob 15 Block 28 Holland ?
A-6900 Teller Katalina F 14¾ Jewish Hungary 20 May 1944
A-23493 Traub Hanka F 5 Jewish Czechosl. June 1944
A-23492 Traub E. F 5 Jewish Czechosl. June 1944
432
Reichmann Friedel, born on Jun. 16, 1935. Klarsfeld/Steinberg, p. 435, Transport XXV of May
19, 1944.

188933 Van Gelder Eddi M 3 Jewish Holland June 1944
188934 Viskoper Robert M 6 Jewish Holland June 1944
? Weinberger Irene F 14 ? Czechosl. Nov. 1944
? Weinheber Berta F 15 ? Czechosl. Nov. 1944
A-27202 Weiss M.E. F 10 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-27197 Weiss Migrun F 6 Jewish Slovakia 2 Nov. 1944
B-14354 Weiss Jurai M 7m Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
? Weiss Lilly F 14 ? Hungary ?
A-27199 Weisshefer B.E. F 14¾ Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-27201 Weisz Eva E. F 13 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
A-27660 Weisz Elisabeth F 11 Jewish Hungary July 1944
? Weisz Marta F 11 ? Czechosl. Nov. 1944
? Weiszmann Ibolya F 13 ? Hungary June 1944
A-27208 Winter Erika F 13 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
B-14348 Winter Otto M 10 Jewish Slovakia 3 Nov. 1944
? Winzorek Bogasta 15 Block 10 Poland ?
? Wolkowitz Rifka F 5 ? Poland August 1944
? Wolkowitz Fischel M 8 ? Poland August 1944
B-14880 Worstmann (Workman) Gabor M 14 Jewish Hungary 7 Jul. 1944
? Wurms Juda M 15 Block 19 Holland ?
B-14828 Zelewski Samuel M 11 Jewish Lodz/Poland August 1944
B-14827 Zelewski Leib M 11 Jewish Lodz/Poland August 1944
? Zelmanovits Mor M 14 Block 18 Hungary ?
A-27218 Ziemlichova Alice F 13 Polish ? 2 Nov. 1944
? Zucker Maria F 13 ? Poland August 1944
A-27772 Zwischberg Vera F 12 Jewish Hungary July 1944
Table 2: List of Twins at Auschwitz

Reg. No. Family name Given name Birthday/age Liberation Date
(L = Liberated)
A-348 Abeles Elisabeth 19 Jul. 1932 ?
A-77 Abeles Peter 19 Jul. 1932 ?
78254 Abrahamson Helli 10 years 27 Jan. 1945
A-7739 Adler Mano 15 Feb. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
Z-5618 Adler Konrad 8 Jan. 1936 ?
Z-5619 Adler Andreas 8 Jan. 1936 ?
A-6029 Adler Fanny 15 Feb. 1932 died at Auschwitz
A-26885 Ajzenberg J.I. 8 years 27 Jan. 1945
A-5772 Alter (Aeter) Sari ? ?
B-5405 Appelbaum Edek (Adolf) 6 years 27 Jan. 1945
B-5406 Appelbaum Milek (Hilek) 6 years 27 Jan. 1945
A-1433 Bach (Back) Isidor 25 Jun. 1927 27 Jan. 1945
A-1434 Bach (Back) Uscher 25 Jun. 1927 27 Jan. 1945
168208 Basch Paul ? ?
168209 Basch Albert ? ?
B-14731 Basch Samio 11 Jul. 1929 27 Jan. 1945
B-14732 Basch Morton 11 Jul. 1929 27 Jan. 1945
? Bauer Sary 15 ?
? Baum Miriam Shteinhoff ? L
? Baum Yizchak ? L
A-5105 Baum Ernst (Erno) 18 Jan. 1929 ?
A-5342 Baum Magda 18 Jan. 1929 ?
A-7212 Baum Judith 31 May 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-26857 Beer Pawlonna 8 27 Jan. 1945
Z-2380 Behrends (Berentz) Johann 19 Apr. 1921 ?
Z-2381 Behrends (Berentz) Frinke 19 Apr. 1921 ?
? Bein Piroska 15 ?
A-25981 Benger Eva 13 27 Jan. 1945
B-2780 Bierman Ephraim 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-20851 Binet Martha 3 27 Jan. 1945
B-14005 Binet Gaszpar 6 27 Jan. 1945
B-14006 Binet Uszn (Robert) 6 27 Jan. 1945
? Blau Eva ? L
? Blau (Eitan) Rachel ? L
A-12080 Bleier Ernö 6 Feb. 1936 27 Jan. 1945
A-5103 Bleier Tibor 9 Jan. 1931 L
A-5104 Bleier Miklos 9 Jan. 1931 …433
A-7199 Bleier Edith 9 27 Jan. 1945
B-14615 Bleier Istvan 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-26847 Blum Vera 11 27 Jan. 1945
B-13979 Blum Palko 6 27 Jan. 1945
? Blyer Yizchak Efrat ? L
B-14003 Braun Peter 10 months 27 Jan. 1945
A-14096 Braun Kalman 31 May 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-17456 Brichta Andreas 5 Jan. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
A-17457 Brichta Karl 5 Jan. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
A-17452 Brodt Antol 12 Mar. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-17453 Brodt Józef 12 Mar. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
433
“Died at the camp as a result of experiments performed.”

(L = Liberated)
A-14090 Brown Yehudith Karen 31 May 1930 27 Jan. 1945
? Bryer (twin brother) ? L
? Bryer Yehudith Mayer ? L
76483 Bucci434 Alessandra 7 years 27 Jan. 1945
76484 Bucci435 Liliana 7 years 27 Jan. 1945
B-13986 Burger Franz 6 years 27 Jan. 1945
B-13987 Burger Thomas 11 years 27 Jan. 1945
A-7264 Chybik Ilse 14 years 27 Jan. 1945
? Cinsk Jurek 6 years ?
A-7057 Czengeri Lea 6 Jun. 1937 27 Jan. 1945
A-7058 Czengeri Yehudith 6 Jun. 1937 27 Jan. 1945
? Czuker Irena Shtronwasser ? L
? Czuker Lea Berkman ? L
A-5132 David Margit 58 years 27 Jan. 1945
? Deitch Hana Faiger ? L
? Deitch Rache Markowitz ? L
A-5135 Demst (Dunst) Therese 19 27 Jan. 1945
A-5136 Demst (Dunst) Lilly 19 27 Jan. 1945
A-9745 German Katalin 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-9746 German Martha 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-3628 Deutzel (German) Ethel 22 ?
A-3629 Deutzel (German) Malvine 22 ?
Z-4636 Dewüs Margot 25 Feb. 1927 ?
Z-4637 Dewüs Elfriede 25 Feb. 1927 ?
A-26877 Diamant Eva 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-8737 Eckstein Rona (Ilona) 8 27 Jan. 1945
A-8738 Eckstein Vera 8 27 Jan. 1945
Z-2924 Einacker Christian 22 Nov. 1931 ?
Z-2925 Einacker Paul 22 Nov. 1931 ?
? Einesman Roza 12 ?
? Eisenberg Judit 9 ?
A-7218 Eisenberger Elisabeth 28 ?
? Epstein Jamas 15 ?
B-14706 Epstein H.M. 14 ¾ 27 Jan. 1945
A-7256 Erenthal Elizabeth 34 ?
A-7257 Erenthal Marie 34 ?
113336 Ernst Hermann 12 Mar. 1910 ?
Z-5645 Ernst Karl 12 Mar. 1910 ?
A-2042 Feingold Jakob 5 Nov. 1927 ?
A-4891 Feingold Rosa 5 Nov. 1927 ?
? Feit Esther ? L
? Feit Ita ? L
A-12089 Fekete Vilmos 7 27 Jan. 1945
A-7060 Fekete Izabella 7 27 Jan. 1945
A-7740 Feld Ludwik 19 Mar. 1904 27 Jan. 1945
A-26919 Feldbaum Marianne 13 27 Jan. 1945
A-781 Fischer Josef 7 Jan. 1936 27 Jan. 1945
A-782 Fischer Georg 7 Jan. 1936 27 Jan. 1945
A-5717 Fogel Isidor 13 May 1929 ?
434
Bucci Alessandra.
435
Bucci Tatiana Liliana.

(L = Liberated)
A-5718 Fogel Mano 13 May 1929 ?
A-15675 Frankfurt Georg 13 Oct. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-15676 Frankfurt Laslo 13 Oct. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-3102 Frankovitz Morris ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-3103 Frankovitz Jacob ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-27789 Frei Rozsi 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-7216 Freiberger Jolan 43 ?
A-7217 Freiberger Margit 43 ?
? Fried Charlotte 21 ?
A-5126 Fried Jolan 21 ?
A-13 Friedman Esther 15 ?
A-14 Friedman Helena 15 ?
A-12081 Friedmann Jakob 12 Oct. 1925 27 Jan. 1945
A-12082 Friedmann Mozes 12 Oct. 1925 27 Jan. 1945
A-7202 Friedmann Olga 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-7203 Friedmann Ewa 12 27 Jan. 1945
B-14058 Fuchs Arpad 10 27 Jan. 1945
? Fuggel Ezra ? L
? Fuggel Menasche ? L
A-15981 Fürst Erika 13 27 Jan. 1945
? Fux Miriam ? L
? Fux Yona Lux ? L
? Geiger Laura 12 ?
? Ginter Genjek 6 ?
? Goldberger Laura 27 Feb. 1929 ?
A-2513 Goldberger Josef 27 Feb. 1929 27 Jan. 1945
A-5119 Goldberger Margit 27 Feb. 1929 ?
A-13203 Goldentahl Ernest 16 Feb. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
A-13202 Goldental Ernö 10 27 Jan. 1945
A-13203 Goldental Sandor 10 27 Jan. 1945
A-7205 Goldental Manka 3 27 Jan. 1945
? Goldenthal Amy ? L
A-13202 Goldenthal Aleksander 16 Feb. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
A-7733 Gottesmann Elias 4 L
A-7734 Gottesmann Jenö 4 L
A-7735 Gottesmann Joseph ? ?
A-27632 Grinspan Ruth 7½ 27 Jan. 1945
A-21945 Grossman Olga Solomon 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-21946 Grossman Vera Krieghel 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-26945 Grossmann Olga 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-26946 Grossmann Vera 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-27633 Grossmann Paula 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-9269 Grossmann Katalin 47 ?
A-9270 Grossmann Susanne 47 ?
A-2518 Grosz Lajosz 22 Nov. 1903 ?
A-2519 Grosz Tibor 22 Nov. 1903 ?
A-26942 Grünbaum Alice 11 27 Jan. 1945
A-7200 Grünbaum Berta 19 27 Jan. 1945
A-7201 Grünbaum Jolan 19 27 Jan. 1945
A-5719 Grünberger Oscar 9 Jun. 1925 ?
A-6030 Grünberger Sara 9 Jun. 1925 ?
A-12958 Grünfeld M. 14 27 Jan. 1945

(L = Liberated)
A-6036 Grünhut Janka 49 ?
? Gutenberg V.J. 9 27 Jan. 1945
? Gutman Menahem (Menesel) ? L
? Gutman (sister) ? L
? Gutman Yoel ? L
? Gutman (triplet sister) ? L
169061 Guttman Rene 21 Dec. 1937 27 Jan. 1945
70917 Guttman Irene 21 Dec. 1937 27 Jan. 1945
A-17545 Hadl Gyuri 7 27 Jan. 1945
A-17546 Hadl Paul 7 27 Jan. 1945
A-9754 Hadl Eva 13 27 Jan. 1945
A-17545 Hadl (Hadel) Georg Heimler 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-17546 Hadl (Hadel) Paul Heimler 6 27 Jan. 1945
B-14095 Hajman J. 4 27 Jan. 1945
Z-5277 Halonek Drachomie 14 May 1936 ?
Z-5278 Halonek Anna 14 May 1936 ?
? Halpern Gabriel 15 ?
B-14101 Hamburger Julius 6 27 Jan. 1945
Z-4975 Hanstein Paul 27 Jun. 1898 ?
B-10502 Hauptmann Zoltan 23 Oct. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
B-10503 Hauptmann Jenö 23 Oct. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
436
A-9747 Havas Agnes 21 Aug. 1927
436
A-9748 Havas Judith 21 Aug. 1927
A-26959 Hecht Eva 2 27 Jan. 1945
? Helbrun Annetta 4 Feb. 1924 L
? Helbrun Stephanie 4 Feb. 1924 L
A-5142 Helenka ? 2½ 27 Jan. 1945
148578 Heller Paul 1 Jul. 1927 ?
148580 Heller Peter 1 Jul. 1927 27 Jan. 1945
A-27638 Hellstein Fella 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-1435 Herbach Andreas 3 Mar. 1925 ?
437
A-1436 Herbach Ladislaus 3 Mar. 1925
? Hermann (fratello) ? L
? Hermann Czvi Weisel ? L
A-7222 Hermann Piroska 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-7223 Hermann Ibolya 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-27681 Herskovic Marta 14 27 Jan. 1945
? Herskovitz Ruth ? L
A-5079 Herskowicz Gizela (Pearle) 23 27 Jan. 1945
A-5080 Herskowicz Helena 23 27 Jan. 1945
? Hochstein Paul 5 ?
A-19999 Hochstein S.D. 4¾ 27 Jan. 1945
A-5197 Hofert Alfred 22 May 1933 L
A-7061 Hoffman Olga 20 27 Jan. 1945
A-7062 Hoffman Ida 20 27 Jan. 1945438
A-26974 Hojman Enka 8 months 27 Jan. 1945
A-5106 Holfert (Holpert) Eugen (Jenö) 22 May 1933 ?
A-5107 Holfert (Szechter) Alfred 22 May 1933 27 Jan. 1945
436
Evacuated to Germany in November 1944, liberated there on May 3 or 4, 1945.
437
Died on the evacuation transport on January 27, 1945 in Czechoslovakian territory.
438
Died after the liberation.

(L = Liberated)
A-5117 Holländer Rosa 22 ?
A-5118 Holländer Laura 22 ?
A-6373 Holländer Anna 13 27 Jan. 1945
? Hornung Henry ? L
? Hornung Victor ? L
188930 Jakobson Heinz 8 27 Jan. 1945
B-14381 Jung ? 4 27 Jan. 1945
170377 Kafka Otto 5 Jan. 1901 ?
A-7047 Kafr (Kaff) Mira 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-7048 Kafr (Kaff) Vera 14 27 Jan. 1945
188926 Kanel Johann 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-27643 Kaplon Irene 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-7220 Kastner Iboria 28 ?
A-7221 Kastner (Singer) Klara 28 ?
A-5720 Katz Abraham 1932 27 Jan. 1945
A-5721 Katz Chaim 1932 ?
B-14105 Keller Ernst 8 27 Jan. 1945
A-9749 Kemenski Klara 24 L
A-9750 Kemenski Magda 24 L
A-7049 Keppes (Köpes) Ewa 19 L
A-7050 Keppes (Köpes) Teresa 19 L
A-8735 Kerpel Marta 17 L
A-8736 Kerpel Ida 17 L
170450 Kestr Friedrich 26 Oct. 1921 ?
170451 Kestr Hans 26 Oct. 1921 ?
A-8739 Kirz (Kurz) Lilly 22 Feb. 1900 27 Jan. 1945439
A-8740 Kirz (Kurz) Edith 22 Feb. 1900 L
A-14319 Kiss Andre 5 Oct. 1928 ?
A-14320 Kiss Laszlo 5 Oct. 1928 ?
? Klein Gyorgy 15 ?
? Klein Bela ? L
? Klein (twin brother) ? L
A-2511 Klein Laslo 31 Jan. 1931 ?
A-2512 Klein Gyula 31 Jan. 1931 ?
A-5331 Klein Ferenz 7 Jun. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
A-5332 Klein Otto 7 Jun. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
A-6471 Klein Agnes 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-7213 Klein Anna 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-7214 Klein Judith 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-4931 Kleinman Martha 14 Apr. 1940 27 Jan. 1945
A-2459 Kleinmann Josef 14 Apr. 1940 27 Jan. 1945
A-19997 Klüger Paul 9½ 27 Jan. 1945
A-5138 Kohn Ewa 15 Mar. 1940 27 Jan. 1945
A-5139 Kohn Klara 15 Mar. 1940 27 Jan. 1945
B-14132 Kohn M.L. 6 27 Jan. 1945
80912 Kohnstein Emilie 12 Sep. 1927 27 Jan. 1945
80913 Kohnstein Gizela 12 Sep. 1927 27 Jan. 1945
B-14156 Krasnianski Iwan 10 27 Jan. 1945
73492 Kraub (Traub) Ewa 5 Jun. 1939 27 Jan. 1945
73493 Kraub (Traub) Hanka 5 Jun. 1939 27 Jan. 1945
439
Died on March 3, 1945.

(L = Liberated)
Z-1773 Kraus Elisabeth 17 Sep. 1923 ?
Z-1774 Kraus Anna 17 Sep. 1923 ?
Z-2660 Kreutz (Krentz) Elise 19 Oct. 1876 ?
Z-2661 Kreutz (Krentz) Johanna 19 Oct. 1876 ?
A-26195 Kufler Yena 10 27 Jan. 1945
A-14321 Kühn Gyorgy 23 Jan. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
A-14322 Kühn Istwan 17 Dec. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
85759 Kurska Kalina 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-7051 Labowicz Lili 15 27 Jan. 1945
A-7052 Labowicz Ewa 15 27 Jan. 1945
A-5544 Lachkar Lucy 21 ?
440
A-27700 Laks Jona 28 Apr. 1928
A-14325 Laufer Josef 12 Aug. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-14326 Laufer Istwan (Stefan) 12 Aug. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-5722 Lazarovitz Yizchak ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-6033 Lazarovitz Gizela 1 Jul. 1929 27 Jan. 1945
A-5722 Lazarowicz Isidor 1 Jul. 1929 ?
170574 Lebenhart Eugen 21 Feb. 1924 ?
B-7636 Lederer Franz 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-342 Leipen Ervin 23 May 1937 ?
A-343 Leipen Paul 23 May 1937 ?
? Levinger Rachel Zehira ? L
? Levinstein Herman ? L
? Levinstein Lili Birkenfeld ? L
B-14182 Lewinger Peter 5 27 Jan. 1945
A-3632 Lichtenstein Lilly 21 L
A-3633 Lichtenstein Malvine 21 L
? Lieberman Tibor 15 ?
? Lieberman Gota ? L
? Lieberman (sister) ? L
? Liechtenstern Kurt 15 ?
A-12083 Lipschitz Erno 16 Jul. 1927 ?
A-12084 Lipschitz Zoltan 16 Jul. 1927 ?
? Lipshitz Elimelek ? L
? Lipshitz Zeipora Milstein ? L
? Löbl Robert 15 ?
A-12090 Lörenzi Andreas 10 27 Jan. 1945
A-7059 Lörenzi Lea 10 27 Jan. 1945
A-5141 Lövinger Rosa 2 L
A-5142 Lövinger Helena 2 L
? Lövy Miriam 4 Jun. 1928 27 Jan. 1945
A-1295 Lövy Leopold 4 Jun. 1928 27 Jan. 1945
A-14097 Lövy (Levy) Andor ? ?
A-14093 Löwenstein Herman 25 Jun. 1930 ?
? Lowy (Lovy) Miriam 6 Apr. 1928 27 Jan. 1945
A-14323 Lustig Gyorgy (Georg) 13 Dec. 1926 27 Jan. 1945
A-14324 Lustig Martin 13 Dec. 1926 27 Jan. 1945
441
A-5121 Lustig-Brauer (Braver) Ewa 22 Dec. 1942
A-5122 Lustig-Brauer (Braver) Agnes 22 Dec. 1942 27 Jan. 1945
440
Evacuated to Ravensbrück, liberated near Leipzig.
441
Died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

(L = Liberated)
A-5123 Lustig-Brauer (Braver) Judith 22 Dec. 1942 27 Jan. 1945
A-5131 Malek Yehudith Feig 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-7736 Malek Salomon 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-7737 Malek Elias 3 27 Jan. 1945
A-7738 Malek Jacob 3 27 Jan. 1945
A-27165 Mangel G.L. 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-1386 Mayer (Meier) Moses 1931 27 Jan. 1945
A-3841 Mayer (Meier) Laura 1931 27 Jan. 1945
A-3637 Mermelstein Marta 11 27 Jan. 1945
A-3638 Mermelstein Waleria 11 27 Jan. 1945
A-3622 Michobowicz Irena 21 L
A-3623 Michobowicz Lenta 21 L
? Mintz Rivka Vered ? L
? Mintz (sister) ? L
? Modiano Samo 15 ?
A-5770 Molnar Suza 20 L
A-5771 Molnar Marie 20 L
A-7063 Moses Eva 11 27 Jan. 1945
A-7064 Moses Miriam 11 27 Jan. 1945
? Moskowitz Elisabeth ? L
A-6034 Moszkowitz Rosa 18 L
442
A-6035 Moszkowitz Helena 18
A-7063 Mozes Eva 31 Jan. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
A-7064 Mozes Miriam 31 Jan. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
A-27063 Neumann Henia 13 27 Jan. 1945
B-14206 Neumann Gabriel J. 8 27 Jan. 1945
B-14213 Neumann G.L. 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-7259 Neuschlöss Judith 17 Dec. 1927 ?
A-14327 Neuschlüss Gabor 17 Dec. 1927 ?
188931 Noach Haskel 10 27 Jan. 1945
78482 Noach R.A. 13 27 Jan. 1945
A-1719 Nochmann Albert 22 Apr. 1885 ?
A-1720 Nochmann Fritz 22 Apr. 1885 ?
A-1766 Oppenheimer Jaroslaus 26 Mar. 1920 ?
A-1767 Oppenheimer Sidonius 26 Mar. 1920 ?
A-1442 Ories (Ovicz) Abraham 26 Sep. 1903 27 Jan. 1945
A-1443 Ories (Ovicz) Markus 16 Jul. 1909 27 Jan. 1945
A-1444 Ories (Ovicz) Sandor 1 27 Jan. 1945
? Orovicz Rischek 5 ?
A-5089 Ovicz (Edenburg) Erika (Frieda) ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-5087 Ovicz (Owicz) Piroska ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-5088 Ovicz (Owicz) Rozsi (Rozhinka) ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-5090 Ovicz (Owicz) Franciska ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-5092 Ovicz (Owicz) Seren (Sara) ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-5093 Ovicz (Owicz) Lina (Leah) ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-5091 Ovicz-Miskovitz Elisabeth ? 27 Jan. 1945
A-7206 Paneth (Pacuta) Ewa 15 L
A-7207 Paneth (Pacuta) Sara 15 L
A-1437 Peterfreund J.S. 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-3630 Peterfreund Agnes 12 Nov. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
442
Died in the camp on August 26, 1944.

(L = Liberated)
A-1437 Peterfreund Istwan 12 Nov. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
? Pflanzen Linka 5 ?
Z-5751 Pohl Alfred 6 Nov. 1931 ?
Z-5752 Pohl Fritz 6 Nov. 1931 ?
443
A-2514 Pollack Abraham 21 Nov. 1924
444
A-2515 Pollack Jacob 21 Nov. 1924
445
A-5417 Pollak Rozsi 11 Mar. 1927
B-1153 Pritichy Alex 7 27 Jan. 1945
A-5602 Rajngevic C.M. 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-7219 Reich Olga 28 ?
A-10508 Reichenberg Efraim (Ernst) 11 Feb. 1928 27 Jan. 1945
B-10507 Reichenberg Laslo 11 Feb. 1928 L
A-3039 Reichmann Friedel 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-10440 Reinitz Georg 12 27 Jan. 1945
B-14245 Rochlitz Alfred 10 27 Jan. 1945
? Rosen Eva ? L
? Rosen Helen ? L
A-7054 Rosenbaum Ruth 25 Mar. 1934 27 Jan. 1945446
A-7055 Rosenbaum Judith 25 Mar. 1934 27 Jan. 1945
? Rosenblum Hana 12 ?
B-14232 Rosenwasser Josef 8 27 Jan. 1945
B-2784 Rosenwasser Lea 12 27 Jan. 1945
B-14820 Rosenzweig Jurek 12 27 Jan. 1945
447
A-5415 Roth Piroska 3 Nov. 1927
448
A-5416 Roth Hermine 3 Nov. 1927
A-27087 Rukovic Erika 3 27 Jan. 1945
? Sainer Ilan ? L
? Sainer (Novomkova) Hana ? L
A-10 Salamon Charlotte Malte 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-11 Salamon Rosa 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-5723 Salomon Lipot 12 Apr. 1924 …
A-5724 Salomon Dezö 12 Apr. 1924 …
A-5725 Salomon Sandor 11 May 1931 27 Jan. 1945
A-5726 Salomon Tibor 11 May 1931 27 Jan. 1945
147689 Salus Georg 10 Mar. 1924 ?
147690 Salus Ladislaus 10 Mar. 1924 ?
A-14094 Sander Josef 6 Oct. 1931 L
A-7208 Sander Rozsi 6 Oct. 1931 L
? Sattler Gardony (Magda) 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-5128 Sattler Vera 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-5129 Sattler Magda 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-9271 Sauer Sara 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-9272 Sauer Margit 14 27 Jan. 1945
449
A-12087 Schick Jose 1
443
Evacuated to Buchenwald.
444
Evacuated to Buchenwald, died on March 11, 1945.
445
Transferred to Buchenwald in October 1944.
446
Died on Mar. 14, 1945.
447
Transferred to Buchenwald in November 1944.
448
Transferred to Buchenwald in November 1944.
449
“Died in the camp as a result of the experiments performed on him.”

(L = Liberated)
A-12088 Schick Otto 1 ?
A-27153 Schick Eva 13 27 Jan. 1945
450
A-7044 Schick Hedi 1
188932 Schlager J.D. 11 27 Jan. 1945
81753 Schlager Laura 9 27 Jan. 1945
? Schlesinger Harry 3 Sep. 1929 27 Jan. 1945
? Schlesinger (twin sister) ? died at Au.
60721 Schlesinger Paula ? L
A-3624 Schlesinger Klara 19 L
A-3625 Schlesinger Lio 19 L
A-5773 Schlesinger Sidonia 9 Mar. 1929 27 Jan. 1945
A-7254 Schlesinger Martha 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-7255 Schlesinger Judith 12 27 Jan. 1945
+ 16 Mar.45451
A-7732 Schlesinger Herman 9 Mar. 1929 ?
B-14324 Schlesinger Pavel 6 27 Jan. 1945
B-14325 Schlesinger Robert 11 27 Jan. 1945
170799 Schön Richard 22 May 1906 ?
170800 Schön Robert 22 May 1906 ?
A-7041 Schröter Judith 12 L
A-7042 Schröter Veronika 12 L
? Schuldenfrei Moritz (Mendel) 11 ?
A-18951 Schwarcz Vera 13 ½ 27 Jan. 1945
? Schwartz Tamas 12 ?
? Schwartz Yakov ? 27 Jan. 1945
? Schwartz Yehuda ? L
452
? Schwartz Eva ?
A-7710 Schwartz Elisabeth ? L
? Schwarz Iren 12 ?
A-14095 Schwarz Kalman 8 Apr. 1932 27 Jan. 1945
A-5109 Schwarz Eugen (Jenö) 13 Apr. 1915 ?
A-5343 Schwarz Elisabeth 8 Apr. 1932 ?
A-5727 Schwarz Aladar 10 Jan. 1921 ?
A-5728 Schwarz Ignatz 10 Jan. 1921 ?
A-6037 Schwarz Elisabeth 49 ?
A-7730 Schwarz Josef 13 Apr. 1925 ?
A-7731 Schwarz Adolf 13 Apr. 1925 ?
B-14295 Schwarz Ferenc 11 27 Jan. 1945
? Schweid Andor 15 ?
A-792 Seiler Sarah 5 Oct. 1940 27 Jan. 1945
A-793 Seiler Hannah 5 Oct. 1940 453
169094 Seiner Milan 16 Nov. 1933 ?
71787 Seiner Milada ? L
71789 Seiner Hanna ? L
A-1199 Seligsohn Arthur 22 Jan. 1889 ?
? Selmanovic Mor 14 ?
A-5133 Senderowicz Gizella 18 L
450
“Died in the camp as a result of the experiments performed on her.”
451
Died on Mar. 16, 1945.
452
Died at Auschwitz.
453
Died at Auschwitz.

(L = Liberated)
A-5134 Senderowicz Rosa 18 L
A-6024 Silberger Judith 20 L
A-6025 Silberger Andrea 20 L
A-7221 Singer (Sinje) Klara 28 years ?
A-1439 Slomowicz Markus 18 Apr. 1925 ?
A-1440 Slomowicz Josef 28 Jan. 1931 ?
A-1441 Slomowicz Idel (Juda) 26 Jun. 1933 ?
A-2517 Slomowicz Lazar Lajoz 8 May 1926 27 Jan. 1945
A-1438 Slomowicz (Slomovitz) Simon 19 Dec. 1897 ?
A-2516 Slomowiecz (Slomowicz) Salomon 8 May 1926 27 Jan. 1945
77303 Sluschakova Wala 3-4 ?
? Solomon Shaul Almog ? L
? Solomon Slomo Almog ? L
A-1 Solomon Rosalia 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-17454 Somogyi Peter 14 Apr. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
A-17455 Somogyi Tomas 14 Apr. 1935 27 Jan. 1945
? Spiegel Magda Zalikovich 5 Jan. 1915 27 Jan. 1945
A-7729 Spiegel Ernst Czvi 5 Jan. 1915 27 Jan. 1945
A-23221 Spirova Frida 9 ?
A-27880 Spirova Dora 9 27 Jan. 1945
A-14328 Stadler Andor 10 Jun. 1929 ?
A-7258 Stadler Vera 10 Jun. 1929 ?
A-27712 Stein Judith 14 27 Jan. 1945
147742 Steiner Zdenek 20 May 1929 27 Jan. 1945
147743 Steiner Georg 20 May 1929 27 Jan. 1945
B-10504 Steiner Endre 9 Jun. 1929 ?
B-10505 Steiner Zoltan 9 Jun. 1929 ?
B-14566 Steiner Jindrich 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-8272 Stern Lea 14 27 Jan. 1945
A-8273 Stern Hojnol 14 27 Jan. 1945
81769 Stockfisch Hariette 3 27 Jan. 1945
147673 Stolz Zdenek 21 Aug. 1921 ?
A-9751 Storch Lenke 30 L
A-60 Storch (Stroch) ? ?
A-9752 Storch (Weiss) Olga 30 L
A-27126 Strauss Gitta 10 27 Jan. 1945
A-27127 Strauss Lilly 12 27 Jan. 1945
B-14272 Strauss D.J. 8 27 Jan. 1945
? Stroch Jakob 15 ?
454
168786 Süsser Fritz 21 Apr. 1904
455
170896 Süsser Hans 21 Apr. 1904
A-14094 Szandor Josef (Henryk) 10 Jun. 1931 27 Jan. 1945
? Taub Yizchak ? L
? Taub Zerah ? L
456
A-2507 Taub Georg 18 Feb. 1933
457
A-2508 Taub Imre 18 Feb. 1933
A-6900 Teller K.J. 14 ¾ 27 Jan. 1945
454
In 1945 to Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp, then evacuated to Dachau Concentration Camp.
455
In 1945 to Gross-Rosen Concentration Camp, then evacuated to Dachau Concentration Camp.
456
In 1945 evacuated to Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
457
In 1945 evacuated to Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

(L = Liberated)
A-3100 Tesler Hermann 1931 27 Jan. 1945
A-3101 Tesler Uszer 1931 27 Jan. 1945
A-23492 Traub E. 5 27 Jan. 1945
A-23493 Traub Hanka 5 27 Jan. 1945
188933 Van Gelder Eddi 3 27 Jan. 1945
? Vigozcka Rachel Vachtel ? L
? Vigozcka Sarah Lushek ? L
188934 Viskoper Robert 6 27 Jan. 1945
458
? Vissan (twin brother) ?
? Vissan Yuppy Yan ? L
A-7046 Wasserman Gisella 16 27 Jan. 1945
A-7045 Wassermann Frieda 16 27 Jan. 1945
? Weinberger Irene 14 ?
? Weinheber Berta 15 ?
A-6031 Weiser Fanny 20 ?
A-6032 Weiser Jolan 20 ?
? Weiss Jonathan Bandy ? L
? Weiss Mayer (Bela) ? L
A-160 Weiss ? ? ?
A-27197 Weiss Migrun 6 27 Jan. 1945
A-27202 Weiss M.E. 10 27 Jan. 1945
A-3626 Weiss Olga ? ?
A-3627 Weiss Malvine ? ?
A-3634 Weiss Edith 1926 27 Jan. 1945
A-3635 Weiss Piroska 1926 27 Jan. 1945
A-5554 Weiss Lili 14 Nov. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-6026 Weiss Ewa 10 Aug. 1922 27 Jan. 1945
A-6027 Weiss Vera 10 Aug. 1922 27 Jan. 1945
A-8270 Weiss Anna 19 L
A-8271 Weiss Katalin 19 L
B-14354 Weiss Jurai 7 months 27 Jan. 1945
A-27199 Weisshefer B.E. 14 ¾ 27 Jan. 1945
? Weisz Marta 11 ?
A-12085 Weisz Bela 8 Nov. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-12086 Weisz Andor (Andre) 8 Nov. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-2509 Weisz Hermann 3 May 1926 ?
A-2510 Weisz Lajosz 3 May 1926 ?
A-27201 Weisz Eva E. 13 27 Jan. 1945
A-27660 Weisz Elisabeth 11 27 Jan. 1945
A-5108 Weisz (Weiss) Sandor 1 Feb. 1930 ?
? Weiszmann Ibolya 13 ?
A-2520 Wiesel Hermann 14 Feb. 1930 27 Jan. 1945
A-2521 Wiesel Siegmund 14 Feb. 1930 ?
A-27208 Winter Erika 13 27 Jan. 1945
B-14348 Winter Otto 10 27 Jan. 1945
? Winzorek Bogasta 15 ?
186644 Wittenberg Imre 2 Jun. 1925 ?
? Wolkowitz Rifka 5 ?
? Wolkowitz Fischel 8 ?
B-14880 Worstmann (Workman) Gabor 14 27 Jan. 1945
458
Died at Auschwitz.

(L = Liberated)
? Wurms Juda 15 ?
? Zawer Miri Sheinberger ? L
? Zawer Sarah Tigherman ? L
B-14827 Zelewski Leib 12 27 Jan. 1945
B-14828 Zelewski Samuel 12 27 Jan. 1945
A-5418 Zelikowic Magda ? ?
A-3102 Zelmanowitz Mor 7 Jun. 1931 27 Jan. 1945
A-5419 Zelmanowitz Eva 7 Jun. 1931 27 Jan. 1945
? Zucker Maria 13 ?
A-27772 Zwischberg Vera 12 27 Jan. 1945
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Sfinge, Parma, 1988.
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Georges Wellers, Deborah Lipstadt, Till Bastian, Florent Brayard et alii contro il
revisionismo storico. Edizioni di Ar, 1996.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2004, Auschwitz: trasferimenti e finte gasazioni. Effepi, Genoa,
2004; German: “Das Ghetto von Lodz in der Holocaust-Propaganda: Die Evakuie-
rung des Lodzer Ghettos und die Deportationen nach Auschwitz (August 1944),”
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– Mattogno, Carlo 2007, La deportazione degli Ebrei ungheresi del maggio-luglio
1944. Effepi, Genoa, 2007; an English translation of an earlier version of this study
is available online as “The Deportation of Hungarian Jews from May to July 1944:
A Preliminary Account” at https://codoh.com/library/document/357/.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2008, Il dottor Mengele e i gemelli di Auschwitz. Effepi, Genoa,
2008; English: “Dr. Mengele’s ‘Medical Experiments’ on Twins in the Birkenau
Gypsy Camp” Inconvenient History 5.4 (2013), pp. 407-451;
http://inconvenienthistory.com/5/4/3223.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2014, “The Recovery of Human Fat in the Cremation Pits,” in: In-
convenient History, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2014; www.inconvenienthistory.com/6/3/3332.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2015a, The Real Case for Auschwiz. Castle Hill Publishers,
Uckfield 2015.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2015b, Auschwitz: Le forniture di coke, legname e Zyklon B.
Effepi, Genoa, 2015.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2015c, The Central Construction Office of the Waffen-SS and Po-
lice Auschwitz: Organization, Responsibilities, Activities. 2nd ed., Castle Hill Pub-
lishers, Uckfield, 2015.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2016a, Debunking the Bunkers of Birkenau: Black Propaganda
Versus History. Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2016b, Auschwitz: Open-Air Incinerations. 2nd ed., Castle Hill
Publishers, Uckfield, 2016.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2016c, Healthcare in Auschwitz: Medical Care and Special Treat-
ment of Registered Inmates. Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2016d, Gli Einsatzgruppen nei territori orientali occupati. Effepi,
Genoa, 2016; English in preparation.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2016e, Inside the Gas Chambers: The Extermination of Main-
stream Holocaust Historiography. 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2016f, Curated Lies: The Auschwitz Museum’s Misrepresenta-
tions, Distortions and Deceptions. Castle Hill, Uckfield, 2016.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2016g, Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the Alleged Homicidal Gas-
sings. 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2016.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2017, Commandant of Auschwitz: Rudolf Höss, His Torture and
His Forced Confessions. Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield 2017.
– Mattogno, Carlo 2018, Auschwitz: A Three-Quarter Century of Propaganda. Ori-
gins, Development and Decline of the “Gas Chamber” Propaganda Lie. Castle Hill
Publishers, Uckfield, 2018.
– Mattogno, Carlo, Franco Deana, The Cremation Furnaces of Auschwitz. Castle Hill
Publishers, Uckfield, 2015, 3 Vols.
– Mattogno, Carlo, Thomas Kues, Jürgen Graf, The “Extermination Camps” of “Ak-
tion Reinhardt”: An Analysis and Refutation of Factitious “Evidence,” Deceptions
and Flawed Argumentation of the “Holocaust Controversies” Bloggers. 2nd ed.,
Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield, 2015.
– Mazal, Harry W., “Zyklon-B. A Brief Report on the Physical Structure and Compo-
sition,” in: http://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/zyklonb/
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senal Techincal Report EB-TR-76023, Department of the Army, Headquarters,
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– Morsch, Günter, Betrand Perz (eds.), Neue Studien zu nationalsozialistischen Mas-
sentötungen durch Giftgas: Historische Bedeutung, technische Entwicklung, revisi-
onistische Leugnung. Metropol, Berlin, 2011.
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von Auschwitz. Verlag Steinhausen, Munich, 1979a; English: Auschwitz Inferno:
The Testimony of a Sonderkommando. translated by S. Flatauer, Routledge &
Kegan, London, 1979b.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1946, Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i kremató-
riumban. Oradea, Nagyvárad, 1946. Tipografia “Grafica” Oradea.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1947, Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i kremató-
riumban. Világ, Debrecen, 1947.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1948, “Tanú voltam Nürnbergben,” in: Világ, April 18 – May 22,
1948.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1951, “S.S.Obersturmfuhrer docteur Mengele. Journal d’un méde-
cin déporté au crématorium d’Auschwitz,” in: Les Temps Modernes, No. 65, March
1951, pp. 1654-1673, and No. 66, April 1951, pp. 1855-1886.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1960, A Doctor’s Eye-witness Account. Translated by Tibère Kre-
mer and Richard Seaver. With a foreword by Bruno Bettelheim. Frederick Fell Edi-
tion, New York, 1960.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1961a, Médecin à Auschwitz: Souvenirs d’un médecin déporté.
translated and adapted from the Hungarian by Tibère Kremer, Julliard, Paris, 1961.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1961b, “Auschwitz. Tagebuch eines Lagerarztes,” in: Quick (Mu-
nich), Nos. 3-11, 1961.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1962, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eye-witness Account. A Panther
Book, London, 1962.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1964, Orvos voltam Auschwitzban (I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz).
Irodalmi könyvkiadó, Bucharest, 1964.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1992, Im Jenseits der Menschlichkeit: Ein Gerichtsmediziner in
Auschwitz. translated by Angelika Bihari, edited by Friedrich Herber, Dietz Verlag,
Berlin, 1992.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 1996, Byłem asystentem doktora Mengele: Wspomnienia lekarza z

Oświęcimia. Wydawnictwo Trio, Warsaw, 1996.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 2000, Byłem asystentem doktora Mengele: Wspomnienia lekarza z
Oświęcimia. translated by Tadeusz Olszański, Frap-Books, Oświęcim, 2000.
– Nyiszli, Myklós 2001, I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant: The Memoirs of an
Auschwitz Physician. translated by Witold Zbirohowski-Kościa, Frap-Books,
Oświęcim, 2001.
– Olson, Kent R., Intossicazioni acute: veleni, farmaci e droghe. Springer-Verlag Ita-
lia, Milan, 1999.
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gegen deren Datierung auf den Sommer 1941,” in: Werkstattgeschichte, No. 18,
November 1999, pp. 45-57.
– Ottolenghi, Gustavo, La mappa dell’inferno: Tutti i luoghi di detenzione nazisti
1933-1945. Sugarco Edizioni, Carnago, 1993.
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1949,” in: Hefte von Auschwitz, Verlag des Staatliches Auschwitz-Museum, No. 18,
1990, pp. 247-367.
– Paskuly, Steven (ed.), Death Dealer. The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at
Auschwitz. Da Capo Press, New York, 1996.
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chemisch-technischer Vorträge. Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, Stuttgart, 1933.
– Phillips, Raymond (ed.), Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen
Trial). William Hodge & Co, London/Edinburgh/Glasgow, 1949.
– Picciotto Fargion, Liliana, Il libro della memoria: Gli Ebrei deportati dall’Italia
(1943-1945). Mursia Editore, Turin, 1995
– Piper, Franciszek 1993, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Verlag Staatliches Mu-
seum in Oświęcim, 1993.
– Piper, Franciszek 1994, “Gas chambers and Crematoria,” in: Gutman/Berenbaum
1994, pp. 157-182.
– Piper, Franciszek 1999, “Vernichtung,” in: Długoborski/Piper 1999, Vol. III.
– Piper, Franciszek 2000, “Mass Murder,” in: Długoborski/Piper 2000, Vol. III.
– Poliakov, Léon, Auschwitz, Julliard, Paris, 1973.
– Porter, Carlos Whitlock, Made in Russia: The Holocaust. Historical Review Press,
Brighton, 1988.
– Posner, Gerald L., John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story. McGraw-Hill Book
Company, New York/St. Louis/San Francisco/Hamburg/Mexico/Toronto, 1986.
– Pressac, Jean-Claude, “Les ‘Krématorien’ IV et V de Birkenau et leurs chambres à
gaz. Construction et fonctionnement,” in: Le Monde Juif, Vol. 38, July-September
1982, pp. 91-131.
– Pressac, Jean-Claude, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers.
The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1989.
– Pressac, Jean-Claude, Les crématoires d’Auschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de
masse. CNRS Éditions, Paris, 1993
– Pressac, Jean-Claude, Le macchine dello sterminio: Auschwitz 1941-1945. Feltri-
nelli, Milan, 1994.
– Provan, Charles D., “New Light on Dr. Miklos Nyiszli and His Auschwitz Book,”
in: The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, January/February 2001, pp.
20-29.
– Rada Ochrony Pomników Walki i Męczeństwa (ed.), Auschwitz: Nazi Extermina-
tion Camp. Interpress Publishers, Warsaw, 1978.
– Rassinier, Paul, Ulysse trahi par les siens, La Librairie française, 1961; reprint: La
Vieille Taupe, Paris, 1980; Rome: La Sfinge, 2006.
– Rassinier, Paul, Le Drame des juifs européens. Les Sept Couleurs, 1964; reprint: La
Vielle Taupe, 1984; Italian: Il dramma degli Ebrei. Edizioni “Europa.” Rome,
1967; slightly abbreviated English translation in:
– Rassinier, Paul, Debunking the Genocide Myth: A Study of the Nazi Concentration
Camps and the Alleged Extermination of European Jewry. Trans. By Adam Rob-
bins, The Noontide Press, Los Angeles, 1978; PDF online at
http://aaargh.vho.org/fran/livres/debunk.pdf.
– Reitlinger, Gerald, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Eu-
rope 1939-1945. Vallentine, Mitchell, London, 1953. Italian.: La soluzione finale: Il
tentativo di sterminio degli Ebrei d’Europa 1939-1945. Il Saggiatore, Milan, 1965.
– Rozett, Robert, Shmuel Spector, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Yad Vashem,
Routledge, New York, 2013.
– Rudolf, Germar 2003, “From the Records of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, Part 2,”
The Revisionist Vol. 1, No. 3, 2003, pp. 352-358.
– Rudolf, Germar 2016 (ed.), Auschwitz: Plain Fact. 2nd ed., Castle Hill Publishers,
Uckfield, 2016.
– Rudolf, Germar 2017, The Chemistry of Auschwitz. Castle Hill Publishers, Uckfield
2017.
– Rudolf, Germar, Mattogno, Carlo, Auschwitz Lies: Legends, Lies, and Prejudices on
the Holocaust. Theses & Dissertations Press, Chicago, 2005.
– Rüter, Christiaan F. (ed.), Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafur-
teile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen 1945-1966. Vol. XXII, Am-
sterdam, 1981.
– Sanford, P. Gerald, Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise. Crosby Lockwood &
Son, London, 1906.
– Sehn, Jan, “Obóz koncentracyjny i zagłady Oświęcim,” in: Biuletyn Głównej
Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce. Poznań, 1946, pp. 63-130.
– Silberschein, Abraham, Die Judenausrottung in Polen. Dritte Serie, II. Teil, “Die
Lagergruppe Oswiecim (Auschwitz),” Geneva, 1944.
– Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ed.), Soviet Government Statements on Na-
zi Atrocities. Hutchinson & Co., London, undated (1946).
– Staatliches Museum Auschwitz (ed.), Die Sterbebücher von Auschwitz. K.G. Saur.
Munich, 1995.
– Strzelecka, Irena, Piotr Setkiewicz, “The Construction, Expansion and Development
of the Camp and its Branches,” in: Długoborski/Piper 2000, Vol. I, pp. 63-138.
– Szymański, Tadeusz, Danuta Szymańska, Tadeusz Śnieszko, “Das ‘Spital’ im Zi-
geuner-Familienlager in Auschwitz-Birkenau,” in: Hamburger Institut für Sozialfor-
schung (ed.), Die Auschwitz-Hefte. Beltz Verlag, Weinheim und Basel, 1987, Vol. I,
pp. 199-207.
– Trunk, Achim, “Die todbringenden Gase,” in: Morsch/Perz 2011, pp. 23-49.
– United Nations War Crimes Commission (ed.), Law Reports of Trials of War Crim-
inals. Selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Eng-
lish Edition. His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1947. Volume I: “Case No.
9. Trial of Bruno Tesch and two others. British Military Court, Hamburg”; Volume
II: “Case No. 10. The Belsen Trial. Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others. British Mil-
itary Court, Luneburg.”
– Université de Strasbourg, Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines (ed.). De
l’Université aux Camps de Concentration. Témoignages Strasbourgeois. 4th ed.,
Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, 1996 (facsimile reprint of the ori-
ginal 1947 edition).
– Vaillant-Couturier, Marie-Claude, Auschwitz. Édition Union des Femmes Fran-
çaises, Paris, 1945.
– van Pelt, Robert Jan, R.J. The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial.
Indiana University Press, Bloomington/Indianapolis, 2002.
– Venezia, Shlomo, Sonderkommando Auschwitz: La verità sulle camere a gas. Una
testimonianza unica. Rizzoli, Milan, 2007.
– Vihar, Béla, Sárga könyv: Adatok a Magyar Zsidóság háborus szenvedéseiből 1941-
1945. Hechaluc-Kiad, Budapest, 1945.
– Volli, Gemma, “La tragedia degli Ebrei di Corfù,” in: Israel, November 4, 1946.
– Vrba, Rudolf, Alan Bestic, I cannot forgive, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1963.
– Wagner, Bernd C., IG Auschwitz: Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung von Häftlingen
des Lagers Monowitz 1941-1945. K.G. Saur Verlag, Munich, 2000.
– Waitz, Robert, “Auschwitz III (Monowitz),” in: Université de Strasbourg 1996, pp.
467-499.
– War Refugee Board (ed.), The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and
Birkenau in Upper Silesia. Executive Office of the President, War Refugee Board,
Washington, D.C., November 1944.
– Wellers, Georges, “Révolte du sondercommando à Auschwitz,” in: Le Monde Juif,
No. 18, April 1949, pp. 17f.
– Wellers, Georges, Les chambres à gaz ont existé: Des documents, des témoignages,
des chiffres. Gallimard, Paris, 1981.
– Wróbel, Halina, “Die Liquidation des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz-Birkenau,”
in: Hefte von Auschwitz, Wydawnictwo Państwowego Muzeum w Oświęcimiu, No.
6, 1962, pp. 3-41.
3. Principal Editions and Translations of Miklós Nyiszli’s Book

– Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Eye-witness Account. Translated by Tibère Kremer and
Richard Seaver. With a foreword by Bruno Bettelheim. Frederick Fell Edition, New
York, 1960.
– Auschwitz: At Last the Truth About Eichman’s Inferno. Fawcett Crest Books,
Greenwich, 1960.
– Médecin à Auschwitz. Souvenirs d’un médecin déporté. Translated by Tibère Kre-
mer, Julliard, Paris, 1961.
– Medico ad Auschwitz: memorie di un deportato assistente del dottor Mengele. Sug-
ar, Milan 1962.
– Auschwitz: A Doctors Eye-witness Account. Panther Books, 1962.

– Am fost medic la Auschwitz. Editura pentru Literatura, Bucharest, 1965.
– Pracownia doktora Mengele: wspomnienia lekarza z Oświe̜cimia. Czytelnik, Wars-
zawa, 1966.
– Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban. Irodalmi Ki-
adó, Bucharest, 1968.
– Orvos voltam Auschwitzban. Irodalmi Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1968.
– Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich,
1969.
– Auschwitz: a doctor’s eyewitness account. Panther Books, London, 1971.
– Am fost medic la Auschwitz. Editura Eminescu, Bucharest, 1971.
– Médecin à Auschwitz: souvenirs d’un médecin déporté. Traduit et adapté du hon-
grois par Tibère Kremer. Éditions J’ai lu, Paris, 1971.
– Auschwitz. A doctor’s eye-witness account. Mayflower Books, St Albans, 1973.
– Auschwitz. O testemuhno de um médico. Record, Rio de Janeiro, 1975.
– Médecin á Auschwitz: souvenirs d’un mdecin déporté. Éditions Famot, Geneva,
1976.
– Medico ad Auschwitz. Longanesi, Milan, 1977.
– Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Eye-Witness Account. Mayflower, London, 1977.
– Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Eye-Witness Account. Granda Publishing, London, 1978.
– Un medico a Auschwitz: memorie di un medico deportato. Edizioni Ferni, Geneva,
1980.
– YaʼOšwitz mesţir: ʻewenatañā tārik. Addis Ababa, 1981.
– U službi Doktora Mengelea. Vjesnikova Press Agencija, Zagreb, 1981.
– Hayiti ozro shel Mengele be-Oshvits. Mar-li, Bnei Brak, 1985.
– Sopravvissuto a Mengele. Sugar Edizioni, Milan, 1985.
– Auschwitz i medici della morte. Fratelli Melita Editore, La Spezia, 1988.
– Hayiti ozro shel Mengeleh be-Oshvits. Mar-li, Bene Berak, 1988.
– Médico en Auschwitz. Editorial Posada, México, 1990.
– Auschwitz i medici della morte. Fratelli Melita Editore, La Spezia, 1991.
– Auschwitz: a doctor’s eyewitness account. Arcade Publishing, New York, 1993.
– Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban. Lajos
Alapítvány, Budapest, 1994.
– Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam. Merényi Kiadó, Budapest, 1997.
– Am fost medic la Auschwitz. Morti fara morminte. Laboratorul si crematoriile doc-
torului Mengele. Editura Aquila ‘93, Oradea, 1998.
– I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant: The Memoirs of an Auschwitz Physician. Frap-
Books, Oświęcim, 2001.
– Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban. Magyar Lajos
Alapítvány, Budapest, 2003.
– Ich war Doktor Mengeles Assistent. Frap-Books, Oświęcim, 2004.
– Hayiti ʻozro shel Mengeleh be-Oshvits. Hotsaʼah u-defus, Lipa Fridman. Bene Be-
rak, 2004.
– Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban. Magvető, Bu-
dapest, 2004.
– Sono stato l’assistente del doktor Mengele: memorie di un medico internato ad Au-
schwitz. Frap-Books, Oświęcim, 2005.
– Im Jenseits der Menschlichkeit: ein Gerichtsmediziner in Auschwitz. Karl Dietz,

Berlin, 2005.
– Maraṇayē toraţuva. Fāsţ Pabliṣin, Koḷamba, 2006.
– Byl jsem Mengeleho asistentem. Academia, Praha, 2009.
– Fui asistente del doctor Mengele: recuerdos de un medico internando en Auschwitz.
Frap-Books, Oświęcim, 2011.
– Auschwitz. A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Arcade Books, 2011.
– Assistent van Mengele: patholoog-anatoom in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Verbum, Laren,
2012.
– Sono stato l’assistente del dottor Mengele. DeltaEdit, Parma, 2013.
– Dr. Mengele boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban. Magvető, Bu-
dapest, 2014.
– Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account. Penguin, London, 2015.
Archive Abbreviations
AGK: Archiwum Głównej Komisji Badania Zbrodni w Polsce, Archives
of the Central Commission for the Investigation of Crimes in Po-
land, now Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Institute of National Re-
membrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against
the Polish Nation), Warsaw
APMO: Archiwum Państwowego Muzeum w Oświęcimiu (Archives of the
State Museum Auschwitz)
BAK: Bundesarchiv Koblenz (German Federal Archives, Koblenz)
FDRL: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, New York
GARF: Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Rossiskoy Federatsii, State Archive of the
Russian Federation, Moscow
IMT: Trials of the Major Criminals before the International Military Tri-
bunal. Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946. Pub-
lished at Nuremberg, Germany, 1947
RGVA: Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennoi Voennyi Arkhiv, Russian State Military
Archive, Moscow
RvO: Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (National Institute for
War Documentation, Amsterdam)
TNA: The National Archives, Kew Richmond, Great Britain, formerly
Public Record Office
YVA: Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem
Documents
DOCUMENT 1: Title page of Miklós Nyiszli’s 1946 book Dr. Mengele

boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban. Copyright by Nyiszli
Miklós, Oradea, Nagyvárad, 1946. Tipografia “Grafica” Oradea.
DOCUMENT 1A: “Declaration” at the beginning of Nyiszli’s book (p. 5).

DOCUMENT 1B: Title page of the 1947 edition of Nyiszli’s Dr. Mengele
boncolóorvosa voltam az auschwitz-i krematóriumban. Copyright by Világ.
Debrecen, 1947.
DOCUMENT 1C: Title page of the 1964 edition of Nyiszli’s book: Orvos
voltam Auschwitzban. Irodalmi könyvkiadó, Bucharest, 1964.
DOCUMENT 2: Miklós Nyiszli’s Declaration of July 29, 1945. Protocol No.

3632. From the website “Deportáltakat Gondozó Országos Bizottság” (
“National Assistance Committee for Deportees”);
http://degob.org/index.php?showjk_img=3632
Document 2 continued.
DOCUMENT 3: Page 6 of the Budapest newspaper Világ with the first sequel
of Miklós Nyiszli’s series “Tanú voltam Nürnbergben” (I” Was a Witness at
Nuremberg”).
DOCUMENT 3A: Detail enlargement of Document 3

DOCUMENT 4: Miklós Nyiszli’s writ of summons to the I.G. Farben Trial,

October 9 [recte: September], 1947; from: Nyiszli 1992, p. 184.
DOCUMENT 5: Miklós Nyiszli’s Affidait of October 8, 1947. NI-11710

(German text).
DOCUMENT 5A: Miklós Nyiszli’s Affidavit of October 8, 1947. NI-11710

(Hungarian text).
Document 5a continued.
DOCUMENT 6: File memo confirming Miklós

Nyiszli’s arrival at Nuremberg on October 3,
1947. From: Provan 2001, p. 28.
DOCUMENT 7: French translation of a letter sent by M. Nyiszli to P.

Rassinier and sent to him by T. Kremer’s translator on October 24, 1951.
Original in the Archives Paul Rassinier, archived at Bibliothèque de
Documentation internationale contemporaine at Nanterre.
DOCUMENT 8: Map of the men’s hospital camp in Sector BIIf of the

Birkenau Camp. From: Czech 1974, unpagined (between p. 48 & 49).
DOCUMENT 9: Operating Instructions of the coke-fired triple-muffle

cremation furnace by Topf. From: Nyiszli 1992. p. 33.
DOCUMENT 10: Floor plan of the ground floor of Crematorium II at

Birkenau. From: Piper 2000, Vol. III, p. 150.
DOCUMENT 11: SS photo of the furnace room of Crematorium II at Birkenau

(1943). From: APMO, Microfilm No. 290.
DOCUMENT 12: Gasifiers at the rear end of the two Topf triple-muffle
cremation furnaces in the crematorium at the Buchenwald Camp. From:
Mattogno/Deana 2015, Vol. III, Photo 205, p. 131.
DOCUMENT 13: Floor plan of the cremation hall of Crematorium II (APMO,

Negative No. 520, with my labels). From: Mattogno/Deana 2015, Vol. II,
Document 223, p. 377.
1-5: Ofen=furnace; 13/1-6: smoke ducts/flues; 14: Rauchkanalschieber=smoke duct
damper; 22 (D1-5): Druckluftgebläse=combustion air blower; 30: Rauchka-
nalschieber=chimney’s smoke duct damper; 31: Zug=chimney duct; 33: Müllver-
brennungsofen= waste incinerator.
DOCUMENT 14: Topf triple-muffle cremation furnaces in the crematorium at

the Buchenwald Camp; blowers located between the two furnaces. From:
Mattogno/Deana 2015, Vol. III, Photo 188, p. 121.
DOCUMENT 15, 15A (next page): Air photo of the area west of the Birkenau
Camp taken on May 31, 1944 (Crematoria, Effektenlager, area of the alleged
“Bunker 2”). From: National Archives, Washington D.C., Record Group no.
373, Mission 60 PRS/462 60 SQ. Can D 1508, Exposure 3055.
DOCUMENT 16: The “grosse Postenkette” (“large guard chain”) around the
Birkenau Camp (black dots) and the Auschwitz Main Camp (white dots).
From: http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/en_15_ucieczki.
DOCUMENT 17: Guard tower of the “grosse Postenkette” outside the

Birkenau Camp, close to the Zentralsauna; 1991. © Carlo Mattogno.
DOCUMENT 18: Telegram of the Geheime Staatspolizei – Staatspolizeistelle

Zichenau/Schröttenburg of October 8, 1944 on the October 7 mass escape of
the inmate staff working inside the crematoria at the Birkenau Camp. From:
http://auschwitz.ru/en/auschwitz/resistance/sonderkommando/#popup[gallery_2]/0/.
DOCUMENT 19: Map of the Birkenau Camp. From: Czech 1989, p. 27.
DOCUMENT 20: Floor plan of

Crematorium IV at the Birkenau
Camp. From: Piper 2000, Vol. III,
p. 162.
DOCUMENT 21: Last page of the medical record of the Jewish prisoner
Beniamin Beresi (covering the time from March 20 through April 3, 1944,
his days 259 through 273 after his admission to the inmate infirmary).
“Hoerlein Document No. 215.” National Archives Microfilm Publications.
Microfilm Publication M892. Records of the United States. Nuernberg War
Crimes Trials. United States of America v. Carl Krauch et al. (Case VI).
August 14, 1947-July 30, 1948. Roll 68. Defense Exhibits. Washington,
1976.
DOCUMENT 22: Autopsy protocol by Dr. Fritz Klein of February 26, 1944
about the Jewish inmate Isaak Attas. Source: as Document 21.
DOCUMENT 23: Josef Mengele on a bicycle. Drawing by Dinah Gottliebová.

From: Kraus/Kulka 1957, p. 212.
Index of Names
Individuals only. Entries in footnotes as italics. This Index does not include
names from the Tables in the Appendix (starting on p. 395)
—A— Braham, Randolph L.: 182, DuBois Jr., Josiah E.: 161
Adler, Hans Günther: 11, 282, 283 Dürrfeld, Walter: 161, 186
240-243 Brandt, Karl: 160
Algawa, Josef: 297 Broad, Pery: 168, 341, 345, —E—
Altstötter, Josef: 160 357, 358, 360 Ehrenburg, Ilya: 141
Ambros, Otto: 161, 299 Brüggemann, Max: 161 Eichmann, Adolf: 11, 212,
Amcham, Morris: 161 Bucci, Alessandra: 393 240, 282
Aroneau, Eugène: 141, 172, Bucci, Tatiana Liliana: 393 Eindenmüller, Rottenführer:
173 Buki, Milton: 266, 380 81, 304
Attas, Isaak: 298, 465 Bürgin, Ernst: 161 Entress, Friedrich: 295, 340,
Aumeier, Hans: 379 Bütefisch, Heinrich: 161 341, 345
Awerbuch, Michael: 298 Enwonwu, C.O.: 388
—C— Epstein, Berthold: 29, 62,
—B— Camhi Fromer, Rebecca: 301 142, 143, 160, 289, 294-
Babitsky, Arthur Harold: 392 Čespiva, Jan: 388 298, 300, 311, 312, 363,
Backhouse, T.M.: 309 Charmatz, Jan: 161 389, 392
Baer, Richard: 188, 260, 262 Christianson, Scott: 219 Erler, Rudolf: 260
Baranowski, Julian: 237 Churchill., Winston: 15, 129
Bartosik, Igor: 248, 257, 260, Clauberg, Carl: 295 —F—
261 Czech, Danuta: 185, 191, 196, Farkas, Elias: 297
Becher, Kurt: 244 198, 206, 214, 230, 232, Farkas, Henrik: 347, 348
Belowus, Wasil: 183 235-237, 239, 241, 242, Feinsilber, Alter: see
Bendel, Charles S.: 13, 14, 244, 257-259, 260, 262, Jankowski, Stanisław
29, 143, 160, 168, 245, 265, 263, 265, 266, 280, 281, Ferri, Luigi: 393
289, 294, 296, 309-330, 283, 284, 289, 290, 294, Fischer, Adolf: 68, 125, 190,
332-336, 340, 342, 343, 296, 299-303, 313, 317, 289, 299, 300, 362
345, 353, 354, 357, 363, 335, 336, 343, 344, 359, Fischer, Bruno: 295
377 450, 462 Fischer, Horst: 295, 379
Bennahmias, Daniel: 160, Flick, Friedrich: 160
289, 301 —D— Flury, Ferdinand: 208
Bennett, John: 376 de Simone, Sergio: 393 Forysz, Michel: 297
Berenbaum, Michael: 12 de Vabres, Donnedieu: 143 Frąckiewicz, Jerzy: 375
Beresi, Benjamin: 298, 464 Deana, Franco: 193, 194, 197, Franco, Francisco: 172
Berillet, Pierre: 309 198, 199, 200-202, 203, Freese, Willi: 260
Bestic, Alan: 313 276, 312, 313, 453-455 Frei, Norbert: 260
Bezwińska, Jadwiga: 266, Dénes, Görög: 68, 111, 125, Freiherr von Verschuer,
290, 343, 359 126, 190, 289, 299, 300, Otmar: 13
Biddle, Francis: 143 350, 362, 377 Freyer, Anne: 11, 223, 270,
Bihari, Angelika: 116, 243, Diels, Rudolph: 341 370
253 Dionne, quintuplets: 29 Frickhinger, Hans Walter:
Bimko, Ada: 353, 355-357 Długoborski, Wacław: 12, 220
Birkett, Norman: 143 375 Friedler, Eric: 301
Bischoff, Karl: 353 Dragon, Szlama: 218, 251, Friedman, Filip: 218
Blaschke, Karl: 228 275, 276, 341, 362
Draper, Gerald I.D.: 309
—G— —J— Kula, Michał: 216

Gajewski, Fritz: 160 Jähne, Friedrich: 161 Kulka, Erich: 230, 379, 469
Gál, Gyula: 349 Jährling, Rudolf: 325
Gasser, Ludwig: 210 Janisch, Josef: 354 —L—
Gattineau, Heinrich: 161 Jankowski, Stanisław: 198, Łanczy, Czeslaus: 297
Gilbert, Martin: 181 266, 358, 360 Langbein, Hermann: 11, 330,
Golinski, Apolinary: 204 Jedrzekiewicz, Richard: 187 331, 378, 379
Gottliebová, Dinah: 30, 44, Jothann, Werner: 205, 206 Langfus, Leib: 185, 235, 301,
289, 300, 389, 390, 392, Jsef, Davied: 187 362
469 Lasik, Aleksander: 218, 280
Grabner, Maximilian: 331, —K— Lassier, Hubert: 392
357, 379 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst: 177, Lautenschläger, Carl: 161
Greifelt, Ulrich: 160 228 Lawrence, Geoffrey: 143
Grósz, Dr.: 27, 289, 290 Kárný, Miroslav: 230, 241, Lengyel, Olga: 378
Grotus, Thomas: 388 299, 392 Lensky, Robert: 219
Grünbaum, Jakob: 297 Kauffmann, Kurt: 177 Lentz III, Harris M.: 392
Grunow, Herta: 267 Kaufman, Mary: 161 Leuchter, Fred A.: 219
Guionnet, Alain: 348 Kemény: 282 Levi, Primo: 290, 297
Günther, Hans: 240 Kenész, Imréné: 348 Lévy, Robert: 27, 143, 160,
Günther, Rolf: 282 Kessler, Richard: 202 190, 289-294, 342
Gutman, Yisrael: 12 Kielar, Wiesław: 257 Lewental, Zalmen: 266, 301
Guttmann, Benno: 297 Kirschneck, Hans: 224 Lewinski, Jakob: 188, 189
György, Huszár: 9 Kitt, Bruno: 295, 319 Lewy, Albert G.D.: 161
Klarsfeld, Serge: 262, 300, Lichtenstein, Heiner: 11
—H— 303, 304, 309, 318, 377, Liebehenschel, Arthur: 205
Häfliger, Paul: 161 397, 398 Lifton, Robert J.: 135, 136,
Hauptmann, Zoltan and Jenö, Klehr, Josef: 375 348, 373, 380, 391
twins: 241 Klein, Fritz: 120, 121, 295, Limousin, Henri: 295
Heller, Otto: 62, 289, 299 298, 304, 319, 379, 465 Lingens-Reiner, Ella: 11
Herber, Friedrich: 161, 165, Klein, Géza: 348 Lipka, Anna: 387
183 Klein, Károly: 348 Lipstadt, Deborah E.: 354
Heydrich, Reinhard: 177 Kloppmann, Joel: 297 List, Wilhelm: 160
Hilberg, Raul: 11, 357 Knopp, Sonja: 304
Himmler, Heinrich: 66, 113, Kogon, Eugen: 171 —M—
196, 206, 244, 312, 313 König, Wilhelm: 319 Makowski, Antoni: 183, 184
Hitler, Adolf: 172 Körner, Jecheskiel (Józef): Mandelbaum, Henryk: 251
Hoffmann, Karl: 299 68, 125, 143, 160, 183, 190, Mann, Wilhelm: 161
Holick, Martin: 205 191, 289, 299, 300, 362 Mansfeld, Gezar: 68, 295
Holländer, Rottenführer: 81, Kranz, Tomasz: 320 Mark, Ber: 301
304 Krauch, Carl: 160, 166, 167, Markus, Kurt: 293, 360
Hörlein, Philipp H.: 160, 297, 297, 299, 464 Marsalek, Hans: 285
464 Kraus, Ota: 230, 379, 469 Mattogno, Carlo: 12, 14, 16,
Höss, Rudolf: 11, 156, 157, Kremer, Tibère: 9, 10, 15, 169, 173, 185, 186, 187,
166, 167, 173, 174, 177, 172-174, 175, 208, 211, 193-195, 197, 198, 199,
212, 213, 217, 223, 227, 356, 368, 447 200-202, 203, 209, 216,
229, 234, 290, 313, 318, Krewer, B.: 309, 310, 312, 223, 227, 229, 230, 233,
330, 331, 339, 340, 342, 313, 314, 317-320, 323, 235, 236, 237, 245, 250,
343, 345, 357-360 327, 330, 332, 336 251, 257, 258, 261, 267,
Krupp, Alfred: 160 276, 291, 300, 303, 304,
—I— Kubica, Helena: 12, 183, 241, 307, 312-314, 320, 332,
Ilgner, Max: 161 286, 296, 300, 305, 306, 341, 343, 353, 371, 379,
Irmscher, Richard: 219 387-391, 393 383, 387, 453-455, 459
Israel, Matilde: 232 Kugler, Hans: 161 Mazal, Harry W.: 212
Iwaszko, Tadeusz: 291 Kühne, Hans: 161 McIlwraith, Ian D.: 143
McNamara, B.P.: 227 Oster, Heinrich: 161 Rahm, Karl: 240

Mengele, Josef: 9, 12, 13, 15, Ottolenghi, Gustavo: 283 Rasch, Walter: 210
19, 21-25, 27, 28, 30-35, Rassinier, Paul: 9, 170-174,
42, 43, 45-49, 55, 56, 59- —P— 176, 181, 192, 201, 215,
70, 74, 82, 83, 85-87, 89, Pach, Jean (Jacques): 362, 245, 246, 255, 354, 382,
90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 103, 363, 377, 378 383, 447
106, 108, 109, 118, 119, Paisikovic, Dov: 222, 223, Reich, Imre: 348
121, 125, 130, 136, 138- 251, 303, 304 Reichenberger, Laslo and
143, 157, 159, 162, 167, Pankowicz, Andzrej: 283 Ernst, twins: 241
175, 181, 189, 190, 203, Paraz, Albert: 9, 170-173 Reitlinger, Gerald: 11, 170,
217-219, 235, 236, 244, Parcer, Jan: 388 353-356
246, 263, 285, 286, 292, Parker, John I.: 143 Reuter, Prof. Dr.: 371
295, 296, 298-300, 304- Paskuly, Steven: 318 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: 15,
307, 309, 310-312, 336, Peters, Gerhard: 165, 208- 129
350, 362, 372-374, 377- 210, 226 Rosenberg, Walter: 266, 283,
381, 387-394, 469 Phillips, Raymond: 13, 304, 313, 343
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: 173 309, 311, 316-319, 328, Rosin, Arnost: 266, 282, 343
Messing, Heinrich: 224 332, 356, 419 Rozett, Robert: 232
Michel: 81, 272, 289, 301 Picciotto Fargion, Liliana: Rudolf, Germar: 188, 210,
Mikołajski, Zdzisław: 266 393 216, 227
Milch, Erhard: 160 Pintzow, Michael: 297 Rüter, Christiaan F.: 375
Minskoff, Emanuel: 139, 143- Piper, Franciszek: 12, 15,
146, 150, 153, 154, 156- 218, 239, 246, 247, 250, —S—
158, 161, 165, 166, 168, 257-259, 266, 271, 273- Sakew, W.: 251
190, 310, 345, 382 275, 304, 315, 319, 320, Sander, Fritz: 193
Möhs, Ernst: 240 347, 358-366, 367, 375, Sanford, P. Gerald: 95
Moll, Otto: 59, 60, 222, 318, 377, 452, 463 Sartre, Jean-Paul: 172, 173
342 Pliszko, Lemke (Chaim): see Scheimetz, Rottenführer: 217,
Mordowicz, Czesław: 282, Pliszko, Meier 218
343 Pliszko, Meier: 261, 262 Schenkarenko, Aleksander:
Müller, Filip: 212, 257, 304, Pohl, Oswald: 160, 185 261, 262
318, 347, 357, 363, 376- Pokrovsky, Yuri: 209 Schmitz, Hermann: 160
379 Poliakov, Léon: 11 Schneider, Christian: 160
Mussfeld, Erich: 34, 59, 68, Porębski, Henryk: 257 Schöttl, Vincenz: 189
72, 74-78, 106, 108, 110, Porter, Carlos W.: 387 Schuster, Heinrich: 342
116, 119, 125, 136, 143, Posner, Gerald L.: 12, 391, Schwarz, Deszö: 251, 252
158, 175, 226, 267, 268, 392 Seaver, Richard: 10, 15, 112,
274, 302 Pressac, Jean-Claude: 11, 12, 127, 356, 369, 372, 373,
196, 197, 214, 216, 217, 382
—N— 223-225, 263, 271, 274, Sehn, Jan: 14, 217, 234, 267,
Nelson, Tim B.: 14 275, 319, 324, 325, 327, 314, 321, 357
Nemes, László: 14 330, 334, 335, 347, 353, Seidl, Hans: 297, 298
Newman, Randolf: 161 354, 368-371 Seitz, Robert: 81, 159, 304
Nikitchenko, Iona T.: 143 Provan, Charles D.: 10, 12, Sentkeller: see Zentkeller,
Nyiszli, Miklós: passim 135, 166, 338, 371-374, Roman
376-378, 380-384 Setkiewicz, Piotr: 234
—O— Prüfer, Kurt: 205, 224 Sewell, Milton A.: 161
Ohlendorf, Otto: 160 Purke, Josef: 260 Shmaglevskaya, Severina:
Olère, David: 159, 197, 222, Puszyna (Puzyna), Martyna: 331
223, 289, 301, 303, 304, 300, 389, 392 Silberschein, Abraham: 348
318, 369 Smoleń, Kazimierz: 313
Olson, Kent R.: 225 —R— Śnieszko, Tadeusz: 296
Olszański, Tadeusz: 253 Rabinovits, Dr.: 350 Soboiko, Moszek: 261, 262
Orth, Karin: 343 Rabinowitsch, Emil: 296
Sobotka, Moshe: see Soboiko, Toepfer, Karl: 261, 262 Waksmann, Gerszon: 186
Moszek Trunk, Achim: 221 Wallenstein, Albrecht von: 86
Spector, Shmuel: 232 Tubridy, Joseph F.: 143 Ware, John: 12, 391, 392
Sprecher, Drexel A.: 161, 166 Weinberger, Alexander: 297
Sproncz, Jószef: 348 —V— Weinblum, Lejzor: 298
Stalin, Joseph: 15, 129 Vaillant-Couturier, Marie Weisskopf, Rudolf: 296, 298-
Steinberg, Karl-Fritz: 80, 81, Claude: 331 300, 389, 392
118 Vámosi, Jenő: 348 Wellers, Georges: 232, 293,
Steinberg, Maxime: 262, 398 van Pelt, Robert Jan: 11, 225, 357
Steiner, Endre and Zoltan, 227 Wesolowski, Jerzy: 343
twins: 241 van Street, Virgil: 161 Wetzler, Alfred: 266, 313,
Steinfeld, Israel: 296 Veesenmayer, Edmund: 283 314, 343, 344, 346-348,
Stössel, Dr.: 153, 154, 166 Venezia, Shlomo: 222, 223 355
Strassmann, Georg: 31, 371, Vihar, Béla: 347, 348 Wind, Marcus: 183, 190
372 Vitek: see Weisskopf, Rudolf Wirths, Eduard: 158, 167,
Strzelecka, Irena: 234 Volchkov, Alexander F.: 143 187, 305, 330, 331, 387
Szabo, Jozsef: 380 Volli, Gemma: 232 Wolff, Dr.: 66, 67, 70, 157,
Szépvölgyi, Dénesné: 348 von Birago, Karl: 128 158
Szymańska, Danuta: 296 von der Heyde, Erich: 161 Wolken, Otto: 234
Szymański, Tadeusz: 296 von Halle, Benvenuto: 139, Wróbel, Halina: 284
143, 145, 147, 159, 161, Wurster, Karl: 161
—T— 164, 165 Wüstinger, Erich: 210
Tabeau, Jerzy: see von Knieriem, August: 160
Wesolowski, Jerzy von Leeb, Wilhelm: 160 —Z—
Tauber, Henryk: 217, 218, von Schnitzler, Georg: 160 Zaun, Alfred: 340
271, 275, 313, 334, 353, von Thadden, Eberhard: 228, Zbirohowski-Kościa,
358, 360, 377, 378 282 Withold: 253
Taylor, George G.: 143 von Weizsäcker, Ernst: 160 Zentkeller, Roman: 24, 32,
Taylor, Telford: 161, 166, 168 Vrba, Rudolf: see Rosenberg, 289
ter Meer, Fritz: 160 Walter Zernik, Franz: 208
Tesch, Bruno: 11, 211, 309, Zippel, Otto: 315, 323, 325
311, 315, 323, 325, 339, —W— Zorovics, Moses: 297
341, 343 Wagner, Bernd C.: 184 Zucker, engineer: 240, 241
Thilo, Heinz: 66, 89, 90, 136, Wagner, Hans: 153, 154, 166 Zündel, Ernst: 12, 219
157, 158, 167, 295, 306 Waitz, Robert: 241, 290
(print edition)
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the most important research in the field. These books are designed to both convince the
common reader as well as academics. The following books have appeared so far, or are
about to be released. Compare hardcopy and eBook prices at www.findbookprices.com.
SECTION ONE:
General Overviews of the Holocaust
The First Holocaust. The Surprising Origin of
the Six-Million Figure. By Don Heddesheimer.
This compact but substantive study documents
propaganda spread prior to,
during and after the FIRST
World War that claimed East
European Jewry was on the Pictured above are all of the scientific studies that comprise the
series Holocaust Handbooks published thus far or are about to
brink of annihilation. The be released. More volumes and new editions are constantly in
magic number of suffering the works. Check www.HolocaustHandbooks.com for updates.
and dying Jews was 6 million refutes the orthodox “Holocaust” narrative. It
back then as well. The book reveals that the Germans were desperate to re-
details how these Jewish fund- duce the death rate in their labor camps, which
raising operations in America was caused by catastrophic
raised vast sums in the name typhus epidemics. Dr. Koller-
of feeding suffering Polish and strom, a science historian,
Russian Jews but actually fun- has taken these intercepts
neled much of the money to Zionist and Com- and a wide array of mostly
munist groups. 5th ed., 200 pages, b&w illustra- unchallenged corroborating
tions, bibliography, index. (#6) evidence to show that “wit-
Lectures on the Holocaust. Controversial Issues ness statements” support-
Cross Examined. By Germar Rudolf. This book ing the human gas chamber
first explains why “the Holocaust” is an impor- narrative clearly clash with
tant topic, and that it is well to keep an open the available scientific data.
mind about it. It then tells how many main- Kollerstrom concludes that
stream scholars expressed the history of the Nazi “Holocaust” has been
doubts and subsequently fell written by the victors with ulterior motives. It is
from grace. Next, the physi- distorted, exaggerated and largely wrong. With
cal traces and documents a foreword by Prof. Dr. James Fetzer. 5th ed.,
about the various claimed 282 pages, b&w ill., bibl., index. (#31)
crime scenes and murder Debating the Holocaust. A New Look at Both
weapons are discussed. Af- Sides. By Thomas Dalton. Mainstream histo-
ter that, the reliability of rians insist that there cannot be, may not be
witness testimony is exam- a debate about the Holocaust. But ignoring it
ined. Finally, the author does not make this controversy go away. Tradi-
lobbies for a free exchange tional scholars admit that there was neither a
of ideas about this topic. This book gives the budget, a plan, nor an order for the Holocaust;
most-comprehensive and up-to-date overview that the key camps have all but vanished, and
of the critical research into the Holocaust. With so have any human remains; that material and
its dialog style, it is pleasant to read, and it can unequivocal documentary evi-
even be used as an encyclopedic compendium. dence is absent; and that there
3rd ed., 596 pages, b&w illustrations, bibliogra- are serious problems with
phy, index.(#15) survivor testimonies. Dalton
Breaking the Spell. The Holocaust, Myth & juxtaposes the traditional
Reality. By Nicholas Kollerstrom. In 1941, Holocaust narrative with re-
British Intelligence analysts cracked the Ger- visionist challenges and then
man “Enigma” code. Hence, in 1942 and 1943, analyzes the mainstream’s
encrypted radio communications between Ger- responses to them. He reveals
man concentration camps and the Berlin head- the weaknesses of both sides,
quarters were decrypted. The intercepted data while declaring revisionism
ISSN 1529-7748 ∙ All books are 6”×9” paperbacks unless otherwise stated. Discounts are available for the whole set.
Holocaust HandbookS • Free Samples at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com
the winner of the current state of the updates; 224 pages, b&w illustrations,
debate. 2nd ed., 332 pages, b&w illus- bibliography (#29).
trations, bibliography, index. (#32) Air Photo Evidence: World War Two
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Photos of Alleged Mass Murder Sites
The Case against the Presumed Ex- Analyzed. By Germar Rudolf (editor).
termination of European Jewry. By During World War Two both German
Arthur R. Butz. The first writer to and Allied reconnaissance aircraft
analyze the entire Holocaust complex took countless air photos of places of
in a precise scientific manner. This tactical and strategic interest in Eu-
book exhibits the overwhelming force rope. These photos are prime evidence
of arguments accumulated by the mid- for the investigation of the Holocaust.
1970s. Butz’s two main arguments Air photos of locations like Auschwitz,
are: 1. All major entities hostile to Maj danek, Treblinka, Babi Yar etc.
Germany must have known what was permit an insight into what did or did
happening to the Jews under German not happen there. The author has un-
authority. They acted during the war earthed many pertinent photos and
as if no mass slaughter was occurring. has thoroughly analyzed them. This
2. All the evidence adduced to proof book is full of air photo reproductions
any mass slaughter has a dual inter- and schematic drawings explaining
pretation, while only the innocuous them. According to the author, these
one can be proven to be correct. This images refute many of the atrocity
book continues to be a major histori- claims made by witnesses in connec-
cal reference work, frequently cited by tion with events in the German sphere
prominent personalities. This edition of influence. 5th edition; with a contri-
has numerous supplements with new bution by Carlo Mattogno. 168 pages,
information gathered over the last 35 8.5”×11”, b&w illustrations, biblio
years. 4th ed., 524 pages, b&w illus- graphy, index (#27).
trations, bibliography, index. (#7)
The Leuchter Reports: Critical Edi-
Dissecting the Holocaust. The Grow- tion. By Fred Leuchter, Robert Fauris-
ing Critique of ‘Truth’ and ‘Memory.’ son and Germar Rudolf. Between 1988
Edited by Germar Rudolf. Dissecting and 1991, U.S. expert on execution
the Holocaust applies state-of-the-art technologies Fred Leuchter wrote four
scientific technique and classic meth-
detailed reports addressing whether
ods of detection to investigate the al-
the Third Reich operated homicidal
leged murder of millions of Jews by
gas chambers. The first report on
Germans during World War II. In 22
contributions—each of some 30 pag- Ausch witz and Majdanek became
es—the 17 authors dissect generally world famous. Based on chemical
accepted paradigms of the “Holocaust.” analyses and various technical argu-
It reads as exciting as a crime novel: so ments, Leuchter concluded that the
many lies, forgeries and deceptions by locations investigated “could not have
politicians, historians and scientists then been, or now be, utilized or seri-
are proven. This is the intellectual ad- ously considered to function as execu-
venture of the 21st century. Be part of tion gas chambers.” The second report
it! 3rd ed., ca. 630 pages, b&w illustra- deals with gas-chamber claims for
tions, bibliography, index. (#1) the camps Dachau, Mauthausen and
Hartheim, while the third reviews de-
The Dissolution of Eastern European sign criteria and operation procedures
Jewry. By Walter N. Sanning. Six Mil- of execution gas chambers in the U.S.
lion Jews died in the Holocaust. San- The fourth report reviews Pressac’s
ning did not take that number at face 1989 tome Auschwitz. 4th ed., 252
value, but thoroughly explored Euro- pages, b&w illustrations. (#16)
pean population developments and
shifts mainly caused by emigration as The Giant with Feet of Clay: Raul Hil-
well as deportations and evacuations berg and His Standard Work on the
conducted by both Nazis and the So- “Holocaust.” By Jürgen Graf. Raul Hil-
viets, among other things. The book berg’s major work The Destruction of
is based mainly on Jewish, Zionist European Jewry is an orthodox stan-
and mainstream sources. It concludes dard work on the Holocaust. But what
that a sizeable share of the Jews found evidence does Hilberg provide to back
missing during local censuses after his thesis that there was a German
the Second World War, which were plan to exterminate Jews, carried out
so far counted as “Holocaust victims,” mainly in gas chambers? Jürgen Graf
had either emigrated (mainly to Israel applies the methods of critical analy-
or the U.S.) or had been deported by sis to Hilberg’s evidence and examines
Stalin to Siberian labor camps. 2nd the results in light of modern histori-
ed., foreword by A.R. Butz, epilogue by ography. The results of Graf’s critical
Germar Rudolf containing important analysis are devastating for Hilberg.
2nd, corrected edition, 139 pages, b&w camp. 2nd ed., 372 pages, b&w illus-
illustrations, bibliography, index. (#3) trations, bibliography, index. (#8)
Jewish Emigration from the Third Belzec in Propaganda, Testimonies,
Reich. By Ingrid Weckert. Current Archeological Research and History.
historical writings about the Third By Carlo Mattogno. Witnesses re-
Reich claim state it was difficult for port that between 600,000 and 3 mil-
Jews to flee from Nazi persecution. lion Jews were murdered in the Bel-
The truth is that Jewish emigration zec camp, located in Poland. Various
was welcomed by the German authori- murder weapons are claimed to have
ties. Emigration was not some kind of been used: diesel gas; unslaked lime
wild flight, but rather a lawfully de- in trains; high voltage; vacuum cham-
termined and regulated matter. Weck- bers; etc. The corpses were incinerated
ert’s booklet elucidates the emigration on huge pyres without leaving a trace.
process in law and policy. She shows For those who know the stories about
that German and Jewish authorities Treblinka this sounds familiar. Thus
worked closely together. Jews inter- the author has restricted this study to
ested in emigrating received detailed the aspects which are new compared
advice and offers of help from both to Treblinka. In contrast to Treblin-
sides. 2nd ed., 130 pages, index. (#12) ka, forensic drillings and excavations
were performed at Belzec, the results
Inside the Gas Chambers: The Exter- of which are critically reviewed. 142
mination of Mainstream Holocaust pages, b&w illustrations, bibliography,
Historiography. By Carlo Mattogno. index. (#9)
Neither increased media propaganda
Sobibor: Holocaust Propaganda and
or political pressure nor judicial perse-
Reality. By Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues
cution can stifle revisionism. Hence, in
and Carlo Mattogno. Between 25,000
early 2011, the Holocaust Orthodoxy
and 2 million Jews are said to have
published a 400 pp. book (in German) been killed in gas chambers in the
claiming to refute “revisionist propa- Sobibór camp in Poland. The corpses
ganda,” trying again to prove “once were allegedly buried in mass graves
and for all” that there were homicidal and later incinerated on pyres. This
gas chambers at the camps of Dachau, book investigates these claims and
Natzweiler, Sachsenhausen, Mau- shows that they are based on the se-
thausen, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, lective use of contradictory eyewitness
Stutthof… you name them. Mattogno testimony. Archeological surveys of
shows with his detailed analysis of the camp in 2000-2001 are analyzed,
this work of propaganda that main- with fatal results for the extermina-
stream Holocaust hagiography is beat- tion camp hypothesis. The book also
ing around the bush rather than ad- documents the general National So-
dressing revisionist research results. cialist policy toward Jews, which
He exposes their myths, distortions never included a genocidal “final so-
and lies. 2nd ed., 280 pages, b&w il- lution.” 442 pages, b&w illustrations,
lustrations, bibliography, index. (#25) bibliography, index. (#19)
The “Extermination Camps” of “Ak-
SECTION TWO: tion Reinhardt”. By Jürgen Graf,
Specific non-Auschwitz Studies Thomas Kues and Carlo Mattogno. In
late 2011, several members of the ex-
Treblinka: Extermination Camp or terminationist Holocaust Controver-
Transit Camp? By Carlo Mattogno and sies blog posted a study online which
Jürgen Graf. It is alleged that at Treb- claims to refute three of our authors’
linka in East Poland between 700,000 monographs on the camps Belzec,
and 3,000,000 persons were murdered Sobibor and Treblinka (see previ-
in 1942 and 1943. The weapons used ous three entries). This tome is their
were said to have been stationary and/ point-by-point response, which makes
or mobile gas chambers, fast-acting or “mincemeat” out of the bloggers’ at-
slow-acting poison gas, unslaked lime, tempt at refutation. Caution:
superheated steam, electricity, diesel The two volumes of this work are
exhaust fumes etc. Holocaust historian intellectual overkill for most
ans alleged that bodies were piled as people. They are recommended
high as multi-storied buildings and only for collectors, connoisseurs
burned without a trace, using little and professionals. These two
or no fuel at all. Graf and Mattogno books require familiarity with
have now analyzed the origins, logic the above-mentioned books, of
and technical feasibility of the official which they are a comprehensive
version of Treblinka. On the basis of update and expansion. 2nd ed.,
numerous documents they reveal Tre- two volumes, total of 1396 pages,
blinka’s true identity as a mere transit illustrations, bibliography. (#28)
Chelmno: A Camp in History & Propa- dition, material traces of the claimed
ganda. By Carlo Mattogno. At Chelm- massacres are rare due to an attitude
no, huge masses of Jewish prisoners of collusion by governments and Jew-
are said to have been gassed in “gas ish lobby groups. 830 pp., b&w illu
vans” or shot (claims vary from 10,000 strations, bibliography, index. (#39)
to 1.3 million victims). This study cov- Concentration Camp Majdanek. A
ers the subject from every angle, un- Historical and Technical Study. By
dermining the orthodox claims about Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf. At
the camp with an overwhelmingly ef- war’s end, the Soviets claimed that up
fective body of evidence. Eyewitness
to two million Jews were murdered
statements, gas wagons as extermina-
at the Majdanek Camp in seven gas
tion weapons, forensics reports and
chambers. Over the decades, how-
excavations, German documents—all
ever, the Majdanek Museum reduced
come under Mattogno’s scrutiny. Here
are the uncensored facts about Chelm- the death toll three times to currently
no, not the propaganda. 2nd ed., 188 78,000, and admitted that there were
pages, indexed, illustrated, bibliogra- “only” two gas chambers. By exhaus-
phy. (#23) tively researching primary sources,
the authors expertly dissect and repu-
The Gas Vans: A Critical Investiga- diate the myth of homicidal gas cham-
tion. By Santiago Alvarez and Pierre bers at that camp. They also criti-
Marais. It is alleged that the Nazis cally investigated the legend of mass
used mobile gas chambers to extermi- executions of Jews in tank trenches
nate 700,000 people. Up until 2011, no and prove them groundless. Again
thorough monograph had appeared on they have produced a standard work
the topic. Santiago Alvarez has rem- of methodical investigation which au-
edied the situation. Are witness state- thentic historiography cannot ignore.
ments reliable? Are documents genu- 3rd ed., 358 pages, b&w illustrations,
ine? Where are the murder weapons? bibliography, index. (#5)
Could they have operated as claimed?
Where are the corpses? In order to get Concentration Camp Stutthof and Its
to the truth of the matter, Alvarez has Function in National Socialist Jewish
scrutinized all known wartime docu- Policy. By Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen
ments and photos about this topic; he Graf. Orthodox historians claim that
has analyzed a huge amount of wit- the Stutthof Camp served as a “make-
ness statements as published in the shift” extermination camp in 1944.
literature and as presented in more Based mainly on archival resources,
than 30 trials held over the decades this study thoroughly debunks this
in Germany, Poland and Israel; and view and shows that Stutthof was in
he has examined the claims made in fact a center for the organization of
the pertinent mainstream literature. German forced labor toward the end of
The result of his research is mind-bog- World War II. 4th ed., 170 pages, b&w
gling. Note: This book and Mattogno’s illustrations, bibliography, index. (#4)
book on Chelmno were edited in par-
allel to make sure they are consistent SECTION THREE:
and not repetitive. 398 pages, b&w il- Auschwitz Studies
lustrations, bibliography, index. (#26)
The Einsatzgruppen in the Occupied The Making of the Auschwitz Myth:
Eastern Territories: Genesis, Mis- Auschwitz in British Intercepts, Pol-
sions and Actions. By C. Mattogno. ish Underground Reports and Post-
Before invading the Soviet Union, war Testimonies (1941-1947). By
the German authorities set up special Carlo Mattogno. Using messages sent
units meant to secure the area behind by the Polish underground to Lon-
the German front. Orthodox histo- don, SS radio messages send to and
rians claim that these unites called from Auschwitz that were intercepted
Einsatzgruppen primarily engaged and decrypted by the British, and a
in rounding up and mass-murdering plethora of witness statements made
Jews. This study sheds a critical light during the war and in the immediate
into this topic by reviewing all the postwar period, the author shows how
pertinent sources as well as mate- exactly the myth of mass murder in
rial traces. It reveals on the one hand Auschwitz gas chambers was created,
that original war-time documents do and how it was turned subsequently
not fully support the orthodox geno- into “history” by intellectually corrupt
cidal narrative, and on the other that scholars who cherry-picked claims
most post-“liberation” sources such as that fit into their agenda and ignored
testimonies and forensic reports are or actively covered up literally thou-
steeped in Soviet atrocity propaganda sands of lies of “witnesses” to make
and are thus utterly unreliable. In ad- their narrative look credible. Ca. 300
pp., b&w illustrations, bibliography, The Chemistry of Auschwitz: The

index. (Scheduled for mid-2020; #41) Technology and Toxicology of Zyklon
The Real Case of Auschwitz: Robert B and the Gas Chambers – A Crime
van Pelt’s Evidence from the Irving Scene Investigation. By Germar Ru-
Trial Critically Reviewed. By Carlo dolf. This study documents forensic
Mattogno. Prof. Robert van Pelt is research on Auschwitz, where mate-
considered one of the best mainstream rial traces and their interpretation
experts on Auschwitz. He became fa- reign supreme. Most of the claimed
mous when appearing as an expert crime scenes – the claimed homicidal
during the London libel trial of Da- gas chambers – are still accessible to
vid Irving against Deborah Lipstadt. forensic examination to some degree.
From it resulted a book titled The This book addresses questions such
Case for Auschwitz, in which van Pelt as: What did these gas chambers look
laid out his case for the existence of like? How did they operate? In addi-
homicidal gas chambers at that camp. tion, the infamous Zyklon B can also
This book is a scholarly response to be examined. What exactly was it?
Prof. van Pelt—and Jean-Claude How does it kill? Does it leave traces
Pressac, upon whose books van Pelt’s in masonry that can be found still
study is largely based. Mattogno lists today? The author also discusses in
all the evidence van Pelt adduces, and depth similar forensic research con-
shows one by one that van Pelt mis- cuted by other authors. 3rd ed., 442
represented and misinterpreted each pages, more than 120 color and almost
single one of them. This is a book of 100 b&w illustrations, biblio graphy,
prime political and scholarly impor- index. (#2)
tance to those looking for the truth Auschwitz Lies: Legends, Lies and
about Auschwitz. 3rd ed., 692 pages, Prejudices on the Holocaust. By C.
b&w illustrations, glossary, bibliogra- Mattogno and G. Rudolf. The falla-
phy, index. (#22) cious research and alleged “refuta
Auschwitz: Plain Facts: A Response tion” of Revisionist scholars by French
to Jean-Claude Pressac. Edited by biochemist G. Wellers (attacking
Germar Rudolf, with contributions Leuchter’s famous report), Polish
by Serge Thion, Robert Faurisson chemist Dr. J. Markiewicz and U.S.
and Carlo Mattogno. French phar- chemist Dr. Richard Green (taking on
macist Jean-Claude Pressac tried to Rudolf’s chemical research), Dr. John
refute revisionist findings with the Zimmerman (tackling Mattogno on
“technical” method. For this he was cremation issues), Michael Shermer
praised by the mainstream, and they and Alex Grobman (trying to prove it
proclaimed victory over the “revision- all), as well as researchers Keren, Mc-
ists.” In his book, Pressac’s works and Carthy and Mazal (how turned cracks
claims are shown to be unscientific into architectural features), are ex-
in nature, as he never substantiate posed for what they are: blatant and
what he claims, and historically false, easily exposed political lies created to
because he systematically misrepre- ostracize dissident historians. 3rd ed.,
sents, misinterprets and misunder- 398 pages, b&w illustrations, index.
stands German wartime documents. (#18)
2nd ed., 226 pages, b&w illustrations, Auschwitz: The Central Construction
glossary bibliography, index. (#14) Office. By C. Mattogno. Based upon
Auschwitz: Technique and Operation mostly unpublished German wartime
of the Gas Chambers: An Introduc- documents, this study describes the
tion and Update. By Germar Rudolf. history, organization, tasks and pro-
Pressac’s 1989 oversize book of the cedures of the one office which was
same title was a trail blazer. Its many responsible for the planning and con-
document reproductions are still valu- struction of the Auschwitz camp com-
able, but after decades of additional plex, including the crematories which
research, Pressac’s annotations are are said to have contained the “gas
outdated. This book summarizes the chambers.” 2nd ed., 188 pages, b&w
most pertinent research results on illustrations, glossary, index. (#13)
Auschwitz gained during the past 30 Garrison and Headquarters Orders of
years. With many references to Pres- the Auschwitz Camp. By C. Mattogno.
sac’s epic tome, it serves as an update A large number of all the orders ever
and correction to it, whether you own issued by the various commanders of
an original hard copy of it, read it the infamous Auschwitz camp have
online, borrow it from a library, pur- been preserved. They reveal the true
chase a reprint, or are just interested nature of the camp with all its daily
in such a summary in general. 144 events. There is not a trace in these
pages, b&w illustrations, bibliogra- orders pointing at anything sinister
phy. (#42) going on in this camp. Quite to the
contrary, many orders are in clear Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Ru-
and insurmountable contradiction mor and Reality. By C. Mattogno. The
to claims that prisoners were mass first gassing in Auschwitz is claimed
murdered. This is a selection of the to have occurred on Sept. 3, 1941, in
most pertinent of these orders to- a basement room. The accounts re-
gether with comments putting them porting it are the archetypes for all
into their proper historical context. later gassing accounts. This study
(Scheduled for late 2020; #34) analyzes all available sources about
Special Treatment in Auschwitz: this alleged event. It shows that these
Origin and Meaning of a Term. By C. sources contradict each other in loca-
Mattogno. When appearing in Ger- tion, date, victims etc, rendering it im-
man wartime documents, terms like possible to extract a consistent story.
“special treatment,” “special action,” Original wartime documents inflict
and others have been interpreted as a final blow to this legend and prove
code words for mass murder. But that without a shadow of a doubt that this
is not always true. This study focuses legendary event never happened. 3rd
on documents about Auschwitz, showed., 190 pages, b&w illustrations, bib-
ing that, while “special” had many liography, index. (#20)
different meanings, not a single one Auschwitz: Crematorium I and the
meant “execution.” Hence the prac- Alleged Homicidal Gassings. By C.
tice of deciphering an alleged “code Mattogno. The morgue of Cremato-
language” by assigning homicidal rium I in Auschwitz is said to be the
meaning to harmless documents – a first homicidal gas chamber there.
key component of mainstream histori- This study investigates all statements
ography – is untenable. 2nd ed., 166
by witnesses and analyzes hundreds
pages, b&w illustrations, bibliogra-
of wartime documents to accurately
phy, index. (#10)
write a history of that building. Where
Healthcare at Auschwitz. By C. Mat- witnesses speak of gassings, they are
togno. In extension of the above study either very vague or, if specific, con-
on Special Treatment in Ausch witz, tradict one another and are refuted
this study proves the extent to which by documented and material facts.
the German authorities at Auschwitz The author also exposes the fraudu-
tried to provide health care for the lent attempts of mainstream histo-
inmates. Part 1 of this book analyzes rians to convert the witnesses’ black
the inmates’ living conditions and the propaganda into “truth” by means of
various sanitary and medical mea- selective quotes, omissions, and dis-
sures implemented. Part 2 explores tortions. Mattogno proves that this
what happened to registered inmates building’s morgue was never a homi-
who were “selected” or subject to “spe- cidal gas chamber, nor could it have
cial treatment” while disabled or sick. worked as such. 2nd ed., 152 pages,
This study shows that a lot was tried
b&w illustrations, bibliography, in-
to cure these inmates, especially un-
dex. (#21)
der the aegis of Garrison Physician
Dr. Wirths. Part 3 is dedicated to Dr. Auschwitz: Open Air Incinerations.
this very Wirths. His reality refutes By C. Mattogno. In spring and sum-
the current stereotype of SS officers. mer of 1944, 400,000 Hungarian Jews
398 pages, b&w illustrations, biblio were deported to Auschwitz and alleg-
graphy, index. (#33) edly murdered there in gas chambers.
Debunking the Bunkers of Auschwitz: The Auschwitz crematoria are said
Black Propaganda vs. History. By to have been unable to cope with so
Carlo Mattogno. The bunkers at Aus- many corpses. Therefore, every single
chwitz, two former farmhouses just day thousands of corpses are claimed
outside the camp’s perimeter, are to have been incinerated on huge
claimed to have been the first homi- pyres lit in deep trenches. The sky
cidal gas chambers at Auschwitz spe- over Ausch witz was covered in thick
cifically equipped for this purpose. smoke. This is what some witnesses
With the help of original German want us to believe. This book examines
wartime files as well as revealing air the many testimonies regarding these
photos taken by Allied reconnaissance incinerations and establishes whether
aircraft in 1944, this study shows these claims were even possible. Using
that these homicidal “bunkers” never air photos, physical evidence and war-
existed, how the rumors about them time documents, the author shows that
evolved as black propaganda created these claims are fiction. A new Appen-
by resistance groups in the camp, and dix contains 3 papers on groundwater
how this propaganda was transformed levels and cattle mass burnings. 2nd
into a false reality. 2nd ed., 292 pages, ed., 202 pages, b&w illustrations, bibli-
b&w ill., bibliography, index. (#11) ography, index. (#17)
The Cremation Furnaces of Ausch onist control has allowed Wiesel and
witz. By Carlo Mattogno & Franco his fellow extremists to force leaders
Deana. An exhaustive study of the of many nations, the U.N. and even
history and technology of cremation popes to genuflect before Wiesel as
in general and of the cremation fur- symbolic acts of subordination to
naces of Auschwitz in particular. On World Jewry, while at the same time
a vast base of technical literature, forcing school children to submit to
extant wartime documents and mate- Holocaust brainwashing. 468 pages,
rial traces, the authors can establish b&w illust., bibliography, index. (#30)
the true nature and capacity of the Auschwitz: Eyewitness Reports and
Ausch witz cremation furnaces. They Perpetrator Confessions. By Jür-
show that these devices were inferior gen Graf. The traditional narrative
make-shift versions of what was usu- of what transpired at the infamous
ally produced, and that their capacity Auschwitz Camp during WWII rests
to cremate corpses was lower than almost exclusively on witness testi-
normal, too. 3 vols., 1198 pages, b&w mony. This study critically scrutinizes
and color illustrations (vols 2 & 3), the 30 most important of them by
bibliography, index, glossary. (#24) checking them for internal coherence,
Curated Lies: The Auschwitz Muse- and by comparing them with one an-
um’s Misrepresentations, Distortions other as well as with other evidence
and Deceptions. By Carlo Mattogno. such as wartime documents, air pho-
Revisionist research results have put tos, forensic research results, and ma-
the Polish Auschwitz Museum under terial traces. The result is devastat-
pressure to answer this challenge. ing for the traditional narrative. 372
They’ve answered. This book analyz- pages, b&w illust., bibl., index. (#36)
es their answer and reveals the ap- Commandant of Auschwitz: Rudolf
pallingly mendacious attitude of the Höss, His Torture and His Forced
Auschwitz Museum authorities when Confessions. By Carlo Mattogno &
presenting documents from their ar- Rudolf Höss. From 1940 to 1943, Ru-
chives. 248 pages, b&w illustrations, dolf Höss was the commandant of the
bibliography, index. (#38) infamous Auschwitz Camp. After the
Deliveries of Coke, Wood and Zyklon war, he was captured by the British.
B to Auschwitz: Neither Proof Nor In the following 13 months until his
Trace for the Holocaust. By Carlo execution, he made 85 depositions of
Mattogno. Researchers from the Aus- various kinds in which he confessed
chwitz Museum tried to prove the re- his involvement in the “Holocaust.”
ality of mass extermination by point- This study first reveals how the Brit-
ing to documents about deliveries of ish tortured him to extract various
wood and coke as well as Zyklon B to “confessions.” Next, all of Höss’s de-
the Auschwitz Camp. positions are analyzed by checking his
If put into the actual claims for internal consistency and
historical and techni- comparing them with established his-
cal context, however, torical facts. The results are eye-open-
these documents ing… 402 pages, b&w illustrations,
prove the exact op- bibliography, index. (#35)
posite of what these An Auschwitz Doctor’s Eyewitness Ac-
orthodox researchers count: The Tall Tales of Dr. Mengele’s
claim. Ca. 250 pages, Assistant Analyzed. By Miklos Nyiszli
b&w illust., bibl., in- & Carlo Mattogno. Nyiszli, a Hungar-
dex. (Scheduled for ian physician, ended up at Auschwitz
2021; #40) in 1944 as Dr. Mengele’s assistant. Af-
ter the war he wrote a book and sev-
SECTION FOUR: eral other writings describing what he
Witness Critique claimed to have experienced. To this
day some traditional historians take
Holocaust High Priest: Elie Wiesel, his accounts seriously, while others
Night, the Memory Cult, and the reject them as grotesque lies and ex-
Rise of Revisionism. By Warren B. aggerations. This study presents and
Routledge. The first unauthorized analyzes Nyiszli’s writings and skill-
biography of Wiesel exposes both his fully separates truth from fabulous
personal deceits and the whole myth fabrication. 484 pages, b&w illustra-
of “the six million.” It shows how Zi- tions, bibliography, index. (#37)
For current prices and availability see book finder sites such as
bookfinder.com, addall.com, bookfinder4u.com or findbookprices.com;
learn more at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com
Published by Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
Books by and from Castle Hill Publishers
Below please find some of the books published or distributed by Castle Hill Publishers in the United
Kingdom. For our current and complete range of products visit our web store at shop.codoh.com.
Thomas Dalton, The Holocaust: An Introduction
The Holocaust was perhaps the greatest crime of the 20th century. Six million Jews,
we are told, died by gassing, shooting, and deprivation. But: Where did the six million
figure come from? How, exactly, did the gas chambers work? Why do we have so little
physical evidence from major death camps? Why haven’t we found even a fraction of the
six million bodies, or their ashes? Why has there been so much media suppression and
governmental censorship on this topic? In a sense, the Holocaust is the greatest murder
mystery in history. It is a topic of greatest importance for the present day. Let’s explore
the evidence, and see where it leads. 128 pp. pb, 5”×8”, ill., bibl., index
Carlo Mattogno, Auschwitz: A Three-Quarter Century of
Propaganda: Origins, Development and Decline of the “Gas Chamber” Propaganda Lie
During the war, wild rumors were circulating about Auschwitz: that the Germans were
testing new war gases; that inmates were murdered in electrocution chambers, with
gas showers or pneumatic hammer systems; that living people were sent on conveyor
belts directly into cremation furnaces; that oils, grease and soap were made of the mass-
murder victims. Nothing of it was true. When the Soviets captured Auschwitz in early
1945, they reported that 4 million inmates were killed on electrocution conveyor belts
discharging their load directly into furnaces. That wasn’t true either. After the war, “wit-
nesses” and “experts” repeated these things and added more fantasies: mass murder with
gas bombs, gas chambers made of canvas; carts driving living people into furnaces; that
the crematoria of Auschwitz could have cremated 400 million victims… Again, none of
it was true. This book gives an overview of the many rumors, myths and lies about Aus-
chwitz which mainstream historians today reject as untrue. It then explains by which
ridiculous methods some claims about Auschwitz were accepted as true and turned into “history,” although
they are just as untrue. 125 pp. pb, 5”×8”, ill., bibl., index, b&w ill.
Wilhelm Stäglich, Auschwitz: A Judge Looks at the Evidence
Auschwitz is the epicenter of the Holocaust, where more people are said to have been
murdered than anywhere else. At this detention camp the industrialized Nazi mass
murder is said to have reached its demonic pinnacle. This narrative is based on a wide
range of evidence, the most important of which was presented during two trials: the
International Military Tribunal of 1945/46, and the German Auschwitz Trial of 1963-
1965 in Frankfurt.
The late Wilhelm Stäglich, until the mid-1970s a German judge, has so far been the only
legal expert to critically analyze this evidence. His research reveals the incredibly scan-
dalous way in which the Allied victors and later the German judicial authorities bent
and broke the law in order to come to politically foregone conclusions. Stäglich also
exposes the shockingly superficial way in which historians are dealing with the many
incongruities and discrepancies of the historical record.
3rd edition 2015, 422 pp. pb, 6“×9“, b&w ill.
Gerard Menuhin: Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil
A prominent Jew from a famous family says the “Holocaust” is a wartime propaganda
myth which has turned into an extortion racket. Far from bearing the sole guilt for start-
ing WWII as alleged at Nuremberg (for which many of the surviving German leaders
were hanged) Germany is mostly innocent in this respect and made numerous attempts
to avoid and later to end the confrontation. During the 1930s Germany was confronted
by a powerful Jewish-dominated world plutocracy out to destroy it… Yes, a prominent
Jew says all this. Accept it or reject it, but be sure to read it and judge for yourself!
The author is the son of the great American-born violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who,
though from a long line of rabbinical ancestors, fiercely criticized the foreign policy of
the state of Israel and its repression of the Palestinians in the Holy Land.
4th edition 2017, 432 pp. pb, 6”×9”, b&w ill.
For prices and availability see www.shop.codoh.com or write to: CHP, PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
Robert H. Countess, Christian Lindtner, Germar Rudolf (eds.),
Exactitude: Festschrift for Prof. Dr. Robert Faurisson
On January 25, 1929, a man was born who probably deserves the title of the most cou-
rageous intellectual of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century: Robert
Faurisson. With bravery and steadfastness, he challenged the dark forces of historical
and political fraud with his unrelenting exposure of their lies and hoaxes surrounding
the orthodox Holocaust narrative. This book describes and celebrates the man, who
passed away on October 21, 2018, and his work dedicated to accuracy and marked by
insubmission.
146 pp. pb, 6”×9”, b&w ill.
Cyrus Cox, Auschwitz – Forensically Examined
It is amazing what modern forensic crime-scene investigations can find out. This is also
true for the Holocaust. There are many big tomes about this, such as Rudolf ’s 400+ page
book on the Chemistry of Auschwitz, or Mattogno’s 1200-page work on the crematoria of
Auschwitz. But who reads those doorstops? Here is a booklet that condenses the most-
important findings of Auschwitz forensics into a nutshell, quick and easy to read. In the
first section, the forensic investigations conducted so far are reviewed. In the second
section, the most-important results of these studies are summarized, making them ac-
cessible to everyone. The main arguments focus on two topics. The first centers around
the poison allegedly used at Auschwitz for mass murder: Zyklon B. Did it leave any
traces in masonry where it was used? Can it be detected to this day? The second topic
deals with mass cremations. Did the crematoria of Auschwitz have the claimed huge
capacity claimed for them? Do air photos taken during the war confirm witness statements on huge smoking
pyres? Find the answers to these questions in this booklet, together with many references to source material
and further reading. The third section reports on how the establishment has reacted to these research results.
124 pp. pb., 5“×8“, b&w ill., bibl., index
Steffen Werner, The Second Babylonian Captivity: The Fate of the Jews in Eastern
Europe since 1941
“But if they were not murdered, where did the six million deported Jews end up?” This is
a standard objection to the revisionist thesis that the Jews were not killed in extermina-
tion camps. It demands a well-founded response. While researching an entirely different
topic, Steffen Werner accidentally stumbled upon the most-peculiar demographic data
of Byelorussia. Years of research subsequently revealed more and more evidence which
eventually allowed him to substantiate a breathtaking and sensational proposition: The
Third Reich did indeed deport many of the Jews of Europe to Eastern Europe in order
to settle them there “in the swamp.” This book, first published in German in 1990, was
the first well-founded work showing what really happened to the Jews deported to the
East by the National Socialists, how they have fared since, and who, what and where they
are “now” (1990). It provides context and purpose for hitherto-obscure and seemingly
arbitrary historical events and quite obviates all need for paranormal events such as genocide, gas chambers,
and all their attendant horrifics. With a preface by Germar Rudolf with references to more-recent research
results in this field of study confirming Werner’s thesis.
190 pp. pb, 6”×9”, b&w ill., bibl., index
Germar Rudolf, Holocaust Skepticism: 20 Questions and Answers about Holocaust
Revisionism
This 15-page brochure introduces the novice to the concept of Holocaust revisionism,
and answers 20 tough questions, among them: What does Holocaust revisionism claim?
Why should I take Holocaust revisionism more seriously than the claim that the earth
is flat? How about the testimonies by survivors and confessions by perpetrators? What
about the pictures of corpse piles in the camps? Why does it matter how many Jews were
killed by the Nazis, since even 1,000 would have been too many? … Glossy full-color
brochure. PDF file free of charge available at www.HolocaustHandbooks.com, Option
“Promotion”. This item is not copyright-protected. Hence, you can do with it whatever
you want: download, post, email, print, multiply, hand out, sell…
15 pp., stapled, 8.5“×11“, full-color throughout
Germar Rudolf, Bungled: “Denying the Holocaust” How Deborah Lipstadt Botched
Her Attempt to Demonstrate the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory
With her book Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt tried to show the flawed
methods and extremist motives of “Holocaust deniers.” This book demonstrates that
Dr. Lipstadt clearly has neither understood the principles of science and scholarship,
nor has she any clue about the historical topics she is writing about. She misquotes,
mistranslates, misrepresents, misinterprets, and makes a plethora of wild claims with-
out backing them up with anything. Rather than dealing thoroughly with factual argu-
ments, Lipstadt’s book is full of ad hominem attacks on her opponents. It is an exercise
in anti-intellectual pseudo-scientific arguments, an exhibition of ideological radicalism
that rejects anything which contradicts its preset conclusions. F for FAIL
2nd ed., 224 pp. pb, 5“×8“, bibl., index, b&w ill.
Carolus Magnus, Bungled: “Denying History”. How Michael Shermer and Alex
Grobman Botched Their Attempt to Refute Those Who Say the Holocaust Never Happened
Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman from the Simon Wiesen-
thal Center wrote a book in 2000 which they claim is “a thorough and thoughtful answer
to all the claims of the Holocaust deniers.” In 2009, a new “updated” edition appeared
with the same ambitious goal. In the meantime, revisionists had published some 10,000
pages of archival and forensic research results. Would their updated edition indeed an-
swer all the revisionist claims? In fact, Shermer and Grobman completely ignored the
vast amount of recent scholarly studies and piled up a heap of falsifications, contortions,
omissions, and fallacious interpretations of the evidence. Finally, what the authors claim
to have demolished is not revisionism but a ridiculous parody of it. They ignored the
known unreliability of their cherry-picked selection of evidence, utilizing unverified
and incestuous sources, and obscuring the massive body of research and all the evidence
that dooms their project to failure. F for FAIL
162 pp. pb, 5“×8“, bibl., index, b&w ill.
Carolus Magnus, Bungled: “Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories”. How James
and Lance Morcan Botched Their Attempt to Affirm the Historicity of the Nazi Genocide
The novelists and movie-makers James and Lance Morcan have produced a book “to
end [Holocaust] denial once and for all.” To do this, “no stone was left unturned” to
verify historical assertions by presenting “a wide array of sources” meant “to shut down
the debate deniers wish to create. One by one, the various arguments Holocaust deniers
use to try to discredit wartime records are carefully scrutinized and then systemati-
cally disproven.” It’s a lie. First, the Morcans completely ignored the vast amount of re-
cent scholarly studies published by revisionists; they didn’t even identify them. Instead,
they engaged in shadowboxing, creating some imaginary, bogus “revisionist” scarecrow
which they then tore to pieces. In addition, their knowledge even of their own side’s
source material was dismal, and the way they backed up their misleading or false claims
was pitifully inadequate. F for FAIL.
Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination 1941-1945
A German government historian documents Stalin’s murderous war against the Ger-
man army and the German people. Based on the author’s lifelong study of German and
Russian military records, this book reveals the Red Army’s grisly record of atrocities
against soldiers and civilians, as ordered by Stalin. Since the 1920s, Stalin planned to
invade Western Europe to initiate the “World Revolution.” He prepared an attack which
was unparalleled in history. The Germans noticed Stalin’s aggressive intentions, but they
underestimated the strength of the Red Army. What unfolded was the most-cruel war
in history. This book shows how Stalin and his Bolshevik henchman used unimaginable
violence and atrocities to break any resistance in the Red Army and to force their un-
willing soldiers to fight against the Germans. The book explains how Soviet propagan-
dists incited their soldiers to unlimited hatred against everything German, and he gives
the reader a short but extremely unpleasant glimpse into what happened when these Soviet soldiers finally
reached German soil in 1945: A gigantic wave of looting, arson, rape, torture, and mass murder…
Udo Walendy, Who Started World War II: Truth for a War-Torn World
For seven decades, mainstream historians have insisted that Germany was the main,
if not the sole culprit for unleashing World War II in Europe. In the present book this
myth is refuted. There is available to the public today a great number of documents on
the foreign policies of the Great Powers before September 1939 as well as a wealth of
literature in the form of memoirs of the persons directly involved in the decisions that
led to the outbreak of World War II. Together, they made possible Walendy’s present
mosaic-like reconstruction of the events before the outbreak of the war in 1939. This
book has been published only after an intensive study of sources, taking the greatest
care to minimize speculation and inference. The present edition has been translated
completely anew from the German original and has been slightly revised.
500 pp. pb, 6”×9”, index, bibl., b&w ill.
Germar Rudolf: Resistance is Obligatory!
In 2005 Rudolf, a peaceful dissident and publisher of revisionist literature, was kid-
napped by the U.S. government and deported to Germany. There the local lackey regime
staged a show trial against him for his historical writings. Rudolf was not permitted to
defend his historical opinions, as the German penal law prohibits this. Yet he defended
himself anyway: 7 days long Rudolf held a speech in the court room, during which he
proved systematically that only the revisionists are scholarly in their attitude, whereas
the Holocaust orthodoxy is merely pseudo-scientific. He then explained in detail why it
is everyone’s obligation to resist, without violence, a government which throws peaceful
dissident into dungeons. When Rudolf tried to publish his public defence speech as a
book from his prison cell, the public prosecutor initiated a new criminal investigation
against him. After his probation time ended in 2011, he dared publish this speech any-
way…
2nd ed. 2016, 378 pp. pb, 6“×9“, b&w ill.
Germar Rudolf, Hunting Germar Rudolf: Essays on a Modern-Day Witch Hunt
German-born revisionist activist, author and publisher Germar Rudolf describes which events made him con-
vert from a Holocaust believer to a Holocaust skeptic, quickly rising to a leading person-
ality within the revisionist movement. This in turn unleashed a tsunami of persecution
against him: loss of his job, denied PhD exam, destruction of his family, driven into
exile, slandered by the mass media, literally hunted, caught, put on a show trial where
filing motions to introduce evidence is illegal under the threat of further proseuction,
and finally locked up in prison for years for nothing else than his peaceful yet controver-
sial scholarly writings. In several essays, Rudolf takes the reader on a journey through
an absurd world of government and societal persecution which most of us could never
even fathom actually exists.…
Germar Rudolf, The Day Amazon Murdered History
Amazon is the world’s biggest book retailer. They dominate the U.S. and several foreign
markets. Pursuant to the 1998 declaration of Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos to offer “the
good, the bad and the ugly,” customers once could buy every book that was in print and
was legal to sell. However, in early 2017, a series of anonymous bomb threats against
Jewish community centers occurred in the U.S., fueling a campaign by Jewish groups
to coax Amazon into banning revisionist writings, false portraing them as anti-Semitic.
On March 6, 2017, Amazon caved in and banned more than 100 books with dissenting
viewpoints on the Holocaust. In April 2017, an Israeli Jew was arrested for having placed
the fake bomb threats, a paid “service” he had offered for years. But that did not change
Amazon’s mind. Its stores remain closed for history books Jewish lobby groups disap-
prove of. This book accompanies the documentary of the same title. Both reveal how revisionist publications
had become so powerfully convincing that the powers that be resorted to what looks like a dirty false-flag
operation in order to get these books banned from Amazon…
128 pp. pb, 5”×8”, bibl., b&w ill.
For current prices and availability see book finder sites such as www.bookfinder.com,
www.addall.com, www.bookfinder4u.com or www.findbookprices.com; learn more at
shop.codoh.com. published by Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 243, Uckfield, TN22 9AW, UK
Thomas Dalton, Hitler on the Jews
That Adolf Hitler spoke out against the Jews is beyond obvious. But of the thousands of
books and articles written on Hitler, virtually none quotes Hitler’s exact words on the
Jews. The reason for this is clear: Those in positions of influence have incentives to pre-
sent a simplistic picture of Hitler as a blood-thirsty tyrant. However, Hitler’s take on the
Jews is far more complex and sophisticated. In this book, for the first time, you can make
up your own mind by reading nearly every idea that Hitler put forth about the Jews, in
considerable detail and in full context. This is the first book ever to compile his remarks
on the Jews. As you will discover, Hitler’s analysis of the Jews, though hostile, is erudite,
detailed, and – surprise, surprise – largely aligns with events of recent decades. There are
many lessons here for the modern-day world to learn.
200 pp. pb, 6”×9”, index, bibl.
Thomas Dalton, Goebbels on the Jews
From the age of 26 until his death in 1945, Joseph Goebbels kept a near-daily diary.
From it, we get a detailed look at the attitudes of one of the highest-ranking men in Nazi
Germany. Goebbels shared Hitler’s dislike of the Jews, and likewise wanted them totally
removed from the Reich territory. Ultimately, Goebbels and others sought to remove
the Jews completely from the Eurasian land mass—perhaps to the island of Madagascar.
This would be the “final solution” to the Jewish Question. Nowhere in the diary does
Goebbels discuss any Hitler order to kill the Jews, nor is there any reference to exter-
mination camps, gas chambers, or any methods of systematic mass-murder. Goebbels
acknowledges that Jews did indeed die by the thousands; but the range and scope of
killings evidently fall far short of the claimed figure of 6 million. This book contains,
for the first time, every significant diary entry relating to the Jews or Jewish policy. Also
included are partial or full citations of 10 major essays by Goebbels on the Jews.
Thomas Dalton, The Jewish Hand in the World Wars
For many centuries, Jews have had a negative reputation in many countries. The reasons
given are plentiful, but less well known is their involvement in war. When we examine
the causal factors for war, and look at its primary beneficiaries, we repeatedly find a
Jewish presence. Throughout history, Jews have played an exceptionally active role in
promoting and inciting war. With their long-notorious influence in government, we
find recurrent instances of Jews promoting hardline stances, being uncompromising,
and actively inciting people to hatred. Jewish misanthropy, rooted in Old Testament
mandates, and combined with a ruthless materialism, has led them, time and again,
to instigate warfare if it served their larger interests. This fact explains much about the
present-day world. In this book, Thomas Dalton examines in detail the Jewish hand in
the two world wars. Along the way, he dissects Jewish motives and Jewish strategies for
maximizing gain amidst warfare, reaching back centuries.
Barbara Kulaszka (ed.), The Second Zündel Trial: Excerpts from the Transcript
In 1988. German-Canadian Ernst Zündel was for on trial a second time for al-
legedly spreading “false news” about the Holocaust. Zündel staged a magnificent
defense in an attempt to prove that revisionist concepts of “the Holocaust” are
essentially correct. Although many of the key players have since passed away,
including Zündel, this historic trial keeps having an impact. It inspired major
research efforts as expounded in the series Holocaust Handbooks. In contrast to
the First Zündel Trial of 1985, the second trial had a much greater impact in-
ternationally, mainly due to the Leuchter Report, the first independent forensic
research performed on Auschwitz, which was endorsed on the witness stand by
British bestselling historian David Irving. The present book features the essential
contents of this landmark trial with all the gripping, at-times-dramatic details.
When Amazon.com decided to ban this 1992 book on a landmark trial about the
“Holocaust”, we decided to put it back in print, lest censorship prevail…
498 pp. pb, 8.5“×11“, bibl., index, b&w ill.

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AN AUSCHWITZ DOCTOR’S EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT

The Bestselling Tall Tales of

Carlo Mattogno, Miklós Nyiszli

Castle Hill Publishers

ISBN10: 1-59148-152-X (print edition)

Published by CASTLE HILL PUBLISHERS

Set in Times New Roman

Chapter XXXV .................................................................................. 115

3.4.4. Camp C (BIIc) ......................................................................... 233

4.2.4. The “Gas Chambers” ............................................................... 314

In spring of 1946, the Jewish Hungarian physician Miklós Nyiszli privately

absurd declarations by Nyiszli, but also highlighted various contradictions be-

Worthy of particular mention here is Charles D. Provan, “a revisionist who

“As chief physician of the crematoria of Auschwitz, I drew up innumerable au-

Byłem asystentem doktora Mengele: Wspomnienia lekarza z Oświęcimia (I

apparent “blemishes” have been faithfully reproduced in the translation below.

Miklós Nyiszli’s Book

I Was Dr. Mengele’s Forensic Pathologist

At Oradea-Nagyvárad, in the month of March, 1946

Germans say – they love to abbreviate everything – K.Z., pronounced

Dr. Mengele calls over a close-shaved inmate in prison uniform of about

German pathologist or forensic specialist from an institute in some German

Subordinate to them, eagerly following their example, is the six-member

me do my work in a filthy shed. I see a certain contradiction there, but I don’t

barbed wire. My reflections are abruptly interrupted by Dr. Mengele. He calls

rather quadrangular tinplate pipes [négyszögletű vasbádog csövek], their sides

place them three at a time [hármasával] on a pushing device made of steel

on the right! The qualification of “candidates for death” applies to them as

chief physician of K.Z. Auschwitz, the highly trained “criminaldoctor”52 – that

I perform an autopsy on a pair of twins, recording every phase of the au-

After Crematorium number II, I carry out my patient-visiting duties in

On our way we pass alongside the crematorium. We reach open road; as

windows, and behind it in turn, an enormous column of smoke rising to the

dence of cases of petechial typhus!” Signed: Dr. Mengele, Hauptsturmführer,

expression. The practice of broad-based epidemic containment was imple-

[vadgesztenyelisztből], margarine made from lignite [lignitszénből], and 30

them to me as assistants for the performance of the ever-growing number of

szegénységet].82 These conditions can be observed exclusively in males. They

washed and dried them and placed them in a wide-mouth, glass-stoppered

Dr. Mengele’s decision regarding the liquidation of Camp “C” shook me

Short-sighted women! Poor things! If they understood the K.Z. mentality

The situation is clear to me now. The Sonderkommando has seized control

As we lie there motionless we continuously receive blows from rifle butts,

Out of respect I do not examine them here, in this pervasively foul-

kommando, he says, will be going in a few days to do heavy labor in a secured

tunk az épületben]. The thirty temporary workers are not a Sonderkommando;

The extermination camp did not remain uninhabited. Thousands of Yugo-

I descended alone; I even preceded the group of forty already assembled. I

three hundred of my companions [ezerháromszáz bajtársam], that I alone

by and about Miklós Nyiszli

2.1. Miklós Nyiszli’s Declaration of July 28, 1945

2.2. Miklós Nyiszli’s “Testimony” at the I.G. Farben

book a documentation that demonstrated everything perfectly, and they treated

2.2.2. “Tanú voltam Nürnbergben” – “I Was a Witness at

This is followed by historical and philosophical digressions on Nuremberg

Nyiszli then reports about Minskoff’s indictment of the Third Reich as a

concentration camp’s official executioner. An SS doctor was present at the

folded in on themselves, or stand in front of the entrance, numbed by apathy,

In Crematorium I (II of today’s numbering), Nyiszli reports, there was also

“I.G. Farben delivered thousands and hundreds of thousands of Cyclon cans.

2.2.3. Nyiszli at Nuremberg: The Affidavit of October 8, 1947

Otto Ambros, Max Brüggemann, Ernst Bürgin, Heinrich Bütefisch, Paul

Declaration under Oath